Posted: September 13, 2023

Writing Across Cultures

"Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading onto her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs and titted downwards."

Male authors, writing female characters, according to an anonymous Tumbler user.

Not long ago, I had a client tell me that she thought her manuscript (which was very strong) was being rejected because her main character came from South America, while she lived in upstate New York. But she had based her character on a relative who did live in rural South America. I suggested that she either dedicate the story to her relative or perhaps include an author's note explaining the connection.

I was a bit disappointed that she had to establish her bona fides for writing a character who didn't belong to her . . . for lack of a better word, social group. I would have thought the character could stand on her own just for who she was. But I understand why her tackling a character outside her group might have been suspect. It is not easy to write from the point of view of someone who, because of who or what they are, has had very different life experiences from your own.

Understand I'm not just talking about creating characters who think differently from you, who have been formed by a history you don't necessarily share. Creating characters who are not you is just part of the writerly art. And as long as your characters come across as plausible (and, hopefully, interesting) human beings, you've done what you need to do. I'm talking about writing from the point of view of someone whose life experience is at least partly shaped by social attitudes and prejudices that you've never experienced because you're not in their group.

You run into this most often over writing characters who are from a different race, gender, or sexual orientation. And I get it. I've never experienced the kind of fear at a traffic stop that a young black man feels, for instance, and I'd find it hard to imagine how that fear might have affected my attitudes toward life. But this problem applies to other areas of life as well. If you were raised with financial stability, it's hard to put yourself in the head of someone who has had to choose between food and rent. If you were raised hand to mouth, it can be hard to imagine being able to walk into a store (or cruise the internet) and buy what you like without worrying about how you're going to pay for it. If you were a woman born in the eighties, it can be hard to understand how it felt to be raised as a woman in the fifties.

Some writers maintain it's impossible to write from the point of view of someone who is very different from you, and it's arrogant to even try. I respectfully disagree, if only because so many skilled writers have managed to pull it off. P. D. James's Adam Dalgleish (we're binging the latest series at the moment) is a believable and likable man. George R. R. Martin's Cersei Lannister, while far from likable, is an entirely plausible woman. Reginald Hill managed to create beloved characters who are both white (Dalziel and Pascoe) and black (Joe Sixsmith).

But there are dangers in writing a character who is not part of your group. Social prejudices shape us in ways that run so deep that we aren't even aware of them. It's easy to miss some basics that everyone in the group you're writing about will spot instantly. And inauthenticity never wins you readers.

There are steps you can take to get the basics right. One is to recognize that no one is entirely shaped just by how society treats their group. We all still have individual histories that make us who we are, and connecting to a character's individual history can be an entry point into their world. It gives you a sense of who they are that you can build on.

Read writers whose characters are in the group you're trying to write. And read more than one. Again, we all have individual stories, so to get a sense of what it's like to belong to a group, you need to look at the group from several different perspectives.

Another thing you can do is to just, you know, ask. If you're a straight woman and one of your main characters is a lesbian, for instance, perhaps you can find a lesbian beta reader and ask her to catch anything important you may have missed.

Finally, why put in the effort to learn to write from the point of view of someone from a different group? Well, besides stretching your own imagination, you can find a lot of dramatic tension in a conflict between two characters who are at odds simply because they see the world very differently. As I've said before, conflict where one character is clearly right and another is clearly wrong is not nearly as engaging as conflict where readers can see both sides.

It's work, but the work is worth it.