Something I
see talked about a lot in the online writing community is getting accurate diverse
characters written into books (people of different ethnicities, LGBTQ, people
with disabilities, etc). Why? To ensure that everyone from every background and
belief has characters they can relate to and, more importantly (in my opinion),
to show people how much variety there is in the world and make them more
accepting of people different than themselves.
This is
actually something that is very challenging to, for several reasons. The
biggest challenge is fighting the social conditioning we have that leads to us simply
using stereotypes – we’re exposed to them through all the media that’s out
there already. Many of the books that inspire current authors are written
either with an absence of diverse characters, or with them represented in
stereotypical ways. It’s far too easy to follow the well-trodden paths.
Then there
is fighting the comfort zone. We are brought up with many taboos, and some can
be very uncomfortable to push past. How do we write about people with different
colours of skin when we’ve been told all our lives that pointing out someone’s
skin colour is racist? How do we write about a disability or a gender identity
we haven’t experienced ourselves?
That leads
into the third challenge: research. Research takes a lot of time and energy. It’s
so much easier to run with the stereotypes, or just avoid unfamiliar topics altogether.
Yet, we
live in a diverse world, and therefore we must push past all out boundaries to
include everyone in our writing. Once we do that, we need to choose how to
present this diversity: do we highlight it, by making the story about modern
issues related to it, or do we blend them in and treat them like we would any
other character?
While there
is a need for the first, I feel that the latter option is the most important
for the future. There are many parts of society that have been characterized in
certain ways, marginalized or outright abused throughout history. This had been
built into our media – movies, shows, games, books – and many of them will last
for generations to come. We’ve become aware of the problem, and it’s getting
talked about more and more – but it won’t be solved until we stop talking about
it and make it normal.
What really
needs to happen is for diverse characters to be added into the media, but
without them being treated any differently than anyone else. By doing so, we normalize
them, and by extension show future generations that not only is it normal for people
to be different – but it’s perfectly okay.
Gone are
the days when everyone needed to be made with the same cookie cutter. As a
society, we are moving closer and closer to accepting people for who they are.
By allowing people to be true to themselves the world becomes a happier place.
But we can never achieve complete acceptance until our sources of entertainment
– which shape us and our ideas in more ways than we realize – represent diversity
as normal. Diversity in media starts here and now, by making the extra effort
to put it in and make sure it’s accurately represented.
The world
is a diverse place. We need to celebrate it, not stifle it, and make it
perfectly normal to be whoever we are.
If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.
I always talk about our need for diversity... But it really occurred to me how blind we can be to it based on the perspective and media culture we grew up in when a friend asked me to read some of his chapters the other day.
ReplyDeleteI mentioned female representation sort of casually and very proudly he pointed out: "I included a female character!"
I pointed out that yes, one of his five or so main characters was female. And that 20% is pretty typical for standard media. Which is strange considering we are 50% of the population. He seemed kinda baffled and miffed that I wasn't impressed.
It kinda just drove home to me that he never really noticed how strange it was because he had always grown up surrounded by representations of people like him. And anything "other", women or people of colour for instance, were the "variant". Like he had his wizard and his Knight and his necromancer and his female.
I've also had other people point out to me, "We shouldn't have to fill a quota. It hurts the creative process." But I don't understand how making a character black, gay, female, etc changes a character so critically that it completely destroys the story you were writing. That there, to me anyway, is a pretty good sign you were relying too heavily on tropes and stereotypes in the first place...
That's exactly it! The problem is that it's so built into our system that it happens accidentally and we don't even notice it.
DeleteFunnily enough, what had me thinking about this was my current WIP. I've been getting frustrated by the overbalance of male vs. female currently in the story when I was specifically aiming for diversity. Normally I would just swap a gender out, like you say, but that would either eliminate one of the other diversity factors or toss a character into a stereotypical role.
To be fair, I'm at 33% female cast involving the main interactions at the moment (also not including the villains, who are fairly balanced), and if we were to look at leading vs. supporting characters it switches to 66% female. So I'm probably just being too picky.
On the other hand, it's an important issue to be picky on. It won't go away by ignoring it - the only way to really deal with it is to saturate our media with diversity until it becomes strange to see something with a monochromatic cast.
I agree :) I think being critical is part of the creative process. It's important to constantly ask ourselves why about everything even outside of gender, race, etc. Diversity aside, it's lazy story telling to rely on tropes so I don't understand why people get so defensive about having to avoid them. It's a lot of work, but I really it's a great exercise in creativity!
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