Writing Across Difference: Responsibly Writing Characters Different From You

In the publishing world, there’s much debate about the ethics of telling a story about a person who identifies differently than the author, particularly if the writer is privileged and writes about traditionally marginalized and underprivileged characters. Can a straight author write from the perspective of a queer character ethically? Can a white author write from the perspective of a Black character in a morally responsible way? Can a cis man write from the perspective of a trans character empathetically? And on and on.

(5 Tips for Helping Readers Empathize With Your Villain.)

The short answer is yes.

As a writer, I bristle at the idea that some topics or characters are out of bounds and that absolutes should constrain our imagination. If we are writing from the standpoint of compassion and doing it well—an important point that I will return to—creating a character different from you can be a powerful way of acknowledging common humanity, demonstrating empathy, and encouraging it in your readers. It’s reductive and ultimately isolating to be denied the chance to imagine lives other than your own. If you follow the argument to its logical end, we’d have to write only from our individual experiences, walling up our creativity in the confines of our personal histories. All creative writing would be memoir.

It also pessimistically assumes that writers are incapable of demonstrating empathy through their craft and that we are, essentially, moral failures. I don’t believe this—well, on most days. Indeed, I don’t think that we should ask writers not to write across difference, but we should insist that they do it well.

But how do we get it right? We must research deeply, be humble, and hone our craft. What, then, do each of these mean?

I’ve been on some LGBTQ+ writers’ panels, which, for the most part, are attended by straight readers and writers. We’re often asked: “If I’m writing a gay character, what pitfalls should I avoid in crafting that character?” Usually, a panelist will say: “Do your research,” or mention tropes to avoid, like “the gay best friend” (i.e., queer characters shouldn’t be the support staff for your straight journey to self-understanding) or “bury your gays” (i.e., tragic queer characters shouldn’t be written as fodder for straight catharsis). Most problematic LGBTQ+ tropes result from centering straight lives in queer stories.

Eventually, in these panels, the responses to this question evolve. We begin sharing obvious research techniques, like “talk to a queer person,” or “make friends with a variety of queer people” (we’re not monolithic!), or “learn about LGBTQ+ history,” or “read our fiction.” How can you write about queer people but not read the stories they write?

An author friend once told me she wouldn’t write a gay point-of-view character in her fiction. She’d include LGBTQ+ characters because she had strong feelings about diversity and inclusivity, but she would never write from the perspective of a queer character because “that’s when you get into trouble.” On hearing this, my heart sank. Her solution was to sideline queer characters because she didn’t want to do the homework, take a risk, and center a queer character. If you care, do the research, be brave, and risk criticism.

But after panels like these have concluded, I’m still not sure we’ve managed to communicate the entirety of what we mean by “do the research.” It’s more than talking to someone who identifies differently than you, or reading a book by or about them, or scanning library databases. It’s about first examining your own biases and motivations. In other words, the first thing you need to research is yourself.

Author Alexander Chee, in a Vulture article titled “How to Unlearn Everything: When It Comes to Writing the ‘Other,’ What Questions Are We Not Asking?” shares the following:

We write what we believe a story is, and so our sense of story is formed by the stories we’ve read. But for most of us, the stories we hear are the first stories that teach us. Stories from family. Stories in the news. Stories we’re taught at school. Gossip, trash talk, and jokes, which are the shortest, complete form of narrative. How you grew up, who you grew up with, how you know them. All of this affects what you think is real, and whom you think counts as human — which, in turn, affects how you write stories.

He explains that we need to examine the community we grew up in, what stories that community told us and reinforced in us, and what conscious and unconscious biases are baked into our upbringings before we write about a member of another community.

For many years, I chaired the high school English department at an independent day school outside Washington, DC. Before I could lead our department in decentering whiteness, straightness, and, well, dead male author-ness from our curriculum, I took a hard look at the stories reinforced by my upbringing and education. To the best of my memory, in high school, I only read two books by Black authors and four by women, and all the authors were dead except for Alice Walker, Tom Stoppard, and Edward Albee. Only one of these books, The Color Purple, overtly addresses LGBTQ+ themes, and the sexual orientation of authors like Edward Albee, Alice Walker, and Tennessee Williams wasn’t discussed. In the early ‘90s, reading a trans author or a text that addressed ableism was unthinkable. So, my imagination and worldview were shaped by books chiefly by and about dead straight men.

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I had to unpack that for myself and imagine the gaps in my knowledge before leading a discussion about our curriculum. It’s not surprising then that my MFA thesis, a novel that will forever be shelved, had no LGBTQ+ characters or characters who weren’t straight and white. I had to interrogate the stories I grew up with and dare to imagine the many stories I wasn’t told and then begin to hunt them down, especially narratives about queer lives by queer writers. My education was largely about a curriculum that reinforced straight male white superiority, not by overtly broadcasting a racist, homophobic, or misogynistic ideology, but by editing out anything that might challenge that viewpoint. I had to do the research to realize that I had to (and still have to) scrutinize my learning and unravel the messaging embedded in it.

If the community you grew up in gives you a strong sense of security and well-being, you may find this kind of research difficult because it will mean tugging at the edges of a reassuring facade and unraveling it. It will be disillusioning, and initially, you will feel lonely. Welcome to the party. But it’s the research you need to do to write across difference. As a gay man, who, like most queer people, has felt like an outsider in their childhood communities, the act of tearing down misconceptions was more freeing than troubling. It’s the gift of being an outsider.

So, let’s say you’re willing to investigate yourself and begin peeling back the layers of your experience. What then? What practical moves can you make in your writing to help combat stereotypes, not reinforce them? How can you build characters who are fully human?

When you set out to write across difference, particularly if you’re writing about a character from a historically marginalized group, you must first be aware of the master narrative perpetuated by the dominant culture, usually cis white straight culture, and then craft your character to challenge those notions.

Eric McDowell, in his article for Michigan Quarterly Review, “Counternarratives: The Power of Narrative,” writes, “[W]e must attend to the ways craft itself can create opportunities for constructive and responsible representation. Many misrepresentations, for example, speak to lazy characterization. Characters, after all, are people as far as we’re concerned, and so we must work to ensure our characters, our people, have the richness and complexity readers require to care about, inhabit, and empathize with them.”

He then quotes author Tobias Wolff from an interview in The Paris Review:

And the most radical political writing of all is that which makes you aware of the reality of another human being. Self-absorbed as we are, self-imprisoned even, we don’t feel that often enough. Most of the spiritualities we’ve evolved are designed to deliver us from that lockup, and art is another way out. Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.

Good writing, then, should allow the reader to “slip past” their preconceptions and into another perspective; it should create an empathetic bond between the reader and the main characters. To achieve that effect, the writer must challenge the reader’s assumptions about a character, which usually are the product of the mainstream culture’s messaging and offer a complete personality. After all, no one thinks of themselves as a stereotype, so how can we, then, identify with a character who is being stereotyped by the author?

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Let me give you an example using an identity group I belong to. Popular culture—the master narrative—suggests that all these statements are true:

Gay men have good taste.Gay men are neurotic.Gay men are better at relationships.Gay men are promiscuous.Gay men aren’t homophobic.Gay men are sassy.

Stereotypes emerge from trends, but whether they’re positive or negative or just silly, they are reductive and, therefore, dehumanizing. So, if you were going to write a story about a gay man, be careful not to lean into any of these stereotypes because I’m more than a collection of half-truths cooked up by a consumerist culture that’s more driven to classify than humanize.

As we all are, I am multitudes, and I’m always changing, evolving, devolving, and cycling through moods. At different points in my life, I’ve been homophobic, self-accepting, chaste, promiscuous, neurotic, healthy, good at relationships, bad at relationships, had good taste, and well, had bad taste. At 6:00 in the morning, before my coffee, I’m not sassy. In the evening, even after a glass or two of wine, I’m still not sassy. No matter who you’re writing about, let a mixture of the expected and unexpected emerge in your characterization. To be human is to be a liquid amalgamation of truths, not one fixed quality.

Works Cited

Chee, Alexander. “Author Alexander Chee on His Advice to Writers.” Vulture, 30 October 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/author-alexander-chee-on-his-advice-to-writers.html. Accessed 19 December 2022.

Livings, Jack. “Tobias Wolff, The Art of Fiction No. 183.” Paris Review, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5391/the-art-of-fiction-no-183-tobias-wolff. Accessed 19 December 2022.

McDowell, Eric, and Michigan Quarterly Review. “Counternarratives: The Power of Narrative.” https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2015/08/counternarratives-the-power-of-narrative/. Accessed 19 December 2022.