Diversity, revisited

 I’m re-writing a novel I wrote in 2009 right now, and the first thing which struck me was how white all my characters were.  This sent me to re-reading Lucy V Hay’s Writing Diverse Characters For Fiction  book.

I’d already changed half my characters into people of colour by then, but I needed a reminder of what else I could be doing.  Lucy provides a list of the ‘top four’ issues we should be considering in our fiction.  These are: race, gender, LGBTQ+ representation, and disability.

So I set out to see how the story I was re-writing fared against her advice.  But first I took note of her advice that ‘at foundation level, all that should concern you is the story’.  What she means is that the diversity must support the story.  She talks about being ‘intentionally inclusive’, thinking about how diverse characters can fit into the story we’re telling, rather than ‘box ticking’ for inclusivity.

So how does my re-write measure up according to her definitions?  Pretty well, actually.  I have two investigatory teams working undercover on a planet. There are separate men’s and women’s teams, and the story has two leads, one male and one female.  The leader of the men’s team is white, the leader of the women’s team black.  There are four people in each team, and two are black and two white.  This is an easy way to do representation, simply shifting roles to different people.  After all, there was no good  reason why both my medics should be white, so now one is black.

The story isn’t about diversity, it’s about stopping institutionalised violence against women.  So gender issues are central to the story.

I’ve avoided some of the worst traps.  I don’t have a Kick-Ass Hottie.  This is the one token female in the story.  I have four, and one is a viewpoint character with agency.  I’ve also avoided the token Black Dude. I’ve got two in my men’s team, and they interact with several other black men throughout the story.  I haven’t fared so well with disability though, and I need to give that some more thought.

Twitter is a great resource for getting exposed to diversity.  I follow a lot of writers, and quite a lot are people of colour.  I follow African-American writers, Vietnamese writers, Asian-American writers, Finnish writers, Native American writers, Australian writers, and people from several more countries and cultures.

These people educate me about what the world is like for them.  I discover how they are discriminated against, what the particular issues are for them, through reading their tweets.  So that would be my top tip for learning more about diversity.  Go follow a bunch of diverse people on Twitter.  It’s the greatest free resource for educating ourselves about others and their different lives.