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…Hi. I know I’ve been rather absent lately (school has been killer), but I came across this short article/blog post today and thought I’d drop it here for discussion.
http://livingintheepic.blogspot.com/2015/11/diversity-in-stories.html
That was a good read, and though for the most part I agree with his reasoning I don’t think it’s maybe such a big deal as he seems to think it.
In my work male characters are decidedly in the majority, but that’s not because I’m ignoring or belittling the importance of women. It’s because I write a lot of battles and quests and adventures and nations conquering nations kind of stuff, and that, generally speaking, is the province of men. The women certainly have their place— rescuing, healing, supporting, etc. but the main characters of all my books (except one, which was historical fiction and not fantasy) are white males. White because my fantasy world doesn’t have minorities— at least not strictly speaking, and male for reasons I already stated.Also, just because a female character isn’t the main character doesn’t mean she has to be bland and uninteresting or unimportant. Far from it! You can take a minor female character and make her one hundred percent true to life and the nature of woman without having her become main. She can (should!) still be an integral part of the story even if it’s not her that actually kills the villain.
So yeah, it’s an interesting thought, and yes, we should certainly strive for diversity because God obviously loves it, but I don’t think it’ll be the end of the world if we don’t.
Good topic, @wordfitlyspoken! 🙂
I like the thought behind the article – to make things how they really are because realism is not just different, it is good. What’s kinda funny though is that, at least with the male protagonist thing, from what I’ve read, female protagonists are actually the majority trend now. That’s fine with me, but the issue, of course, is that this is a propagandist ploy not just female authors writing the type of characters they know more about.
I can also sympathise with the predominance of white characters in books. I think the reason for this is that most authors in America are white (because most people in America are white) and so they simply write the ethnic group they most relate too and can most clearly express. Naturally, we as Americans tend to read these American books.
There is, of course, an advantage to adding diversity to a story. Simply put, it means more potential. More potential for failure, yes, but also more potential for success.
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I don’t have racial minorities, but I’m not giving every one the same shade of skin.
I think it’s really all about who fits in your story. If you are writing a story about a group of men, women will obviously be under represented. If your story is set in China, most likely everyone will be Chinese. If you’re writing in futuristic America, why not put a Japanese person in if it makes sense.
And people are different from each other in more ways that their culture. I probably have more in common with an african-american Christian home-schooled girl than a girl my age who lives down the street. There are many ways to make people diverse.
I’m with you all–I think he has a point about diversity being realistic, but I don’t think it’s as simple as just shoving a bunch of different characters in there for the sake of it. A lot of it does depend on the story. Like Anna said, “If your story is set in China, most likely everyone will be Chinese.”
What do y’all think about intentionally trying to include different races and other groups of people in stories, though? Do you think that should be part of our brainstorming process? How could it tie into the story in such a way that it is affecting the story in some real way?
That was an interesting article. My two cents on the skin color/ethnicity part of it:
In my family, we are about as diverse as you can get when it comes to skin color. I have two biological brothers, both extremely caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes. As for myself, I have olive skin and brown hair and eyes. My sister is Chinese. My 3 youngest brothers are mulatto.
I say all of that because though I don’t purposely create characters of different ethnicity, it kinda happens automatically because it’s just a part of my life. It’s not difficult or unusual for me to have characters pop up here and there that aren’t caucasion. But the biggest thing I’ve realized about those characters in my writing is that I really don’t make a big deal out of it. Skin is skin. Just because someone has more or less pigment in their skin doesn’t mean anything.
Absolutely right @Ivy-Rose. It’s not a big deal. Skin is skin. I might even go so far as to say if we are ‘shamed’ into including minority groups when it wasn’t originally part of the story, it would hurt the story. Just like randomly inserting any story element would.
As for a good way to use diversity in a story, @wordfitlyspoken, I would say if you’re using it to make a point. Say the message of the story is learning to work together despite differences— in that case many different character traits and people groups could come together in the form of your main characters and learn to see past their differences and get the job done. In that instance, even if the actual color of the characters’ skin isn’t the issue it would be very apt to have a Caucasian, a Japanese, a Chinese, and a Hispanic. It’s used to highlight the message of the story.
Not to say you can’t have characters from different people groups just for the fun of it, but it’s generally better to make sure it fits in with the actual story in some way, however minor. 🙂A lot of the time, the actually authentically diverse books include diversity in part of the concept. Like, it’s a detriment to the story that these people don’t fully understand each other… or have certain prejudices against each other… stuff like that. But then there are the books that just sort of squeak them in there because they can.
I don’t know. Generally, if you want something in your book, having it work in with the concept is best, no matter what we’re talking about.Absolutely, skin is skin. I’m thinking more along the lines of ethnical differences here.
Sounds like we’re all in agreement that the best way (and perhaps only good way) this works is if it’s actually a part of the concept. My question is, is there any reason we “should” intentionally work on developing stories of this type? Or should we just kind of keep it open as an option in case we happen to get an idea that goes with this?
I think there is.
If ethnic minorities present a challenge to an author who is not familiar with that group, they also present a fascination to the reader who has probably been as uninformed as we have.
As a side note, there are often certain cliches that people unthinkingly fall into for ethnic minorities. For instance, there are gazillions of civil war era fiction novels. I’m taking a bit of a guess here, but I think it’s safe to say the majority of black characters in these stories are probably slaves. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I think a story would stand out more if it had a black character who a southern slave owner or an ex-slave who had fled to Canada and become a poet. To a degree, such originality can help break the character from being an ethnic place holder and turn them into a vibrant personality.
For those of you who saw beyond the mask, Basil was a good example of a vibrant ethnic minority cliche shatterer. The one thing was he taught us little about the Indian people or their culture, which of course wouldn’t have fit the story, but if it had, it would have been interesting.
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One thing I’ve heard is that you should treat some kinds of people as normal and others as different. Most of us have a tendency to default to what we used to and describe foreign characters differently. Either they are the only ones described in detail or their race can be used as the description.
Like @Daeus said, if you do include an character who is an ethnic minority, one should make them fresh and completely human, not following common cliches.
This is actually a topic I’ve thought some on. I am writing a trilogy and realized all my characters where white…simply because about everyone I know is white and that is naturally how I make my characters. And then I was torn. I didn’t want to add someone with a different color skin simply for the sake of the skin color to be ‘politically correct’. At the same time, realistically, there might be characters of various nationalities or colors and I wanted distinct characters. I’m rambling now, sorry. Anyhow, I think something like skin color and ethnic differences is something to consider when creating characters (though the techie doesn’t have to be Asian). But it is the characters which are important to the story, not their skin color and nationality.
On another note, in my fantasy world I’ve loosely based my nations off real nations. So I have various color skins, hair colors, heights, eyes, etc.
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I don’t think it’s unrealistic to write a story in which there is little diversity. In fact, including diversity can make a story unrealistic. It all depends on what kind of culture your story takes place in. The story should drive the elements, not a political agenda.
For example, if you were to write a story that took place in say, India, it would be unrealistic to have a bunch of white people in the story. However, it would not be wrong to have the majority of the characters be Indian, why? Because it’s in India.
In America, 63% of people are white. That means, if we’re just going by census numbers, 6 out of 10 characters in your story should be white (this is ignoring the fact that there are different demographics within the US). Only 17% are Hispanic, and 12% black. So basically, only 1 out of 10 characters should be black if we’re talking about realism (again, depends on the demographic).
As for male versus female, again, it depends on where your story takes place, both in time and place. And like Daeus pointed out, most of the main characters in popular fiction today are females, so his point on that front is moot.
Yes, there is only one human race, and we are all created in the image of God, but let’s not get caught up in the Worldly battle cry for Diversity, which more often tends to divide, rather than unify, and for the sake of itself, can make an unrealistic story.
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