Oh, there was a sequel to that? Well, that’s good to know {rushing off to add to wishlist}. I loved The Talisman, but I read it when I was about 15 or so. And I still have to finish the Dark Tower series…
while i realize that every writer has their own process, it seems to me that if one is not taking into consideration those elements which i have previously described from the very beginning then no amount of editorial revision short of going back and starting over is going to be sufficient to make the character into a well-rounded character of some racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic group different from that of the author. i am an unpublished writer of short fiction and poetry so i am mostly speaking from my own experiences here but i find it unlikely that, for example, a white, straight, cis-male author is going to be able to take some generic character they have written in a story and they are going to somehow through editorial revision transform that character into a believable african-american character or a believable japanese female character etc.
totally understand, i included that other name as a parenthetical in case someone reading this had stopped at the drawing of the three in the larger work and included her family name because of work with my mother the family genealogist. my own form of pedantry i suppose.
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Alan Moore brought this up in one of his essays about writing for comics. I can’t find the exact passage but it was something along the lines of
“If I write a character who is a fungus-based life form from Alpha Centauri then I don’t have to worry about nuance or authenticity because whatever I write isn’t going to impact the lives of fungus-people of Alpha Centauri. But if I write a character who is a woman or a homosexual or a Black person or a Muslim then I have a responsibility to do my research and get it right because I am contributing to the way the world thinks about women and homosexuals and Black people and Muslims.”
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Anyway, I do believe that, with research and hard work on understanding, non-POC authors can write good, authentic POC characters regardless of whether they initially set out to do so or whether they just started writing an amorphous character who develops into a POC character. They are just two different processes. I personally think that the latter approach helps to prevent stereotypes from being baked into the character from the beginning (though stereotypes can, of course, creep in either way).
That is almost certainly true for the protagonist of a story, but for secondary and tertiary characters (who are the most likely to be made into tropes), I do not see why an author needs to decide the races of those characters from the start.
Anyway, it’s past 1:00am here and I have work tomorrow, so I am going to go ahead and step away from this discussion. I did not mean for it to be so controversial; I just wanted to look at how the sausage gets made from the writing side and thought that maybe generic characters might at least be a step up from using tropes or caricatures. YMMV
Also… obligatory…
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Haha. That’s exactly who I thought of when reading what you were replying to. You’d actually think there would be lots of typecasting for that kind of role - a magical European occultist in the Western tradition - looking very much like Crowley…
Maybe a good exercise then for some of these writers would be writing a story that has a POC protagonist and then honestly critiquing it with an eye towards how race is portrayed, allowing themselves to honestly hear about the flaws in their work.
Editing is what makes writing more than word diarrhea after all, right?
But my god don’t burden random POC friends with editing that could be so awkward. Editing and critiquing is actual work. There are workshops and things like that where people will do this either for money or sometimes because they’re nice enough to volunteer.
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Let’s add another layer here: male writers creating female characters. Let me give everyone a moment to laugh and sigh and think about their favorite worst offenders. OK, so…do you think a man can write a character that just so happens to be determined to be a woman after he’s halfway through the story? Or will his own lived experience mean he already has a mental framework for what a female character should be like, rather than a male character? How is that any different?
“The author’s own background and experience”, by definition, will be a much better fit for characters like him, and a much worse fit for characters unlike him.
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Another problem that people face when writing POC though is that of the reader. One problem that seems to come up a lot is that in a culture where whiteness is seen as the default state of characters to such a degree that foreign media like a lot of anime can be read as “white” by some viewers… well then the readers aren’t going to do much heavy lifting on that matter. So I’m not surprised that ends up encouraging a sort of exaggeration, playing to type, writing characters more like tropes. But it does harm because it perpetuates the problem, reinforcing it.
I’m not even remotely trying to be snarky here. I think the best thing that white people who want to write better POC could ever do is to invest time, money, and ego points to writing better POC and workshopping that with people, classes, volunteer groups willing to give feedback on that subject.
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one of my stories was a novella i wrote from the perspective of an emotionally and sexually abused/frustrated housewife. before i started it i read a collection of books on feminism and the patriarchy and worked to put myself into the emotional space of my main character as well as the headspace of my secondary characters. by the time i finished writing it i was an emotional wreck and half-drunk much of the time i wasn’t writing. i’ve never gotten it published but i’ve had four women read it and all of them told me they’d never have guessed the author was a man if they hadn’t known ahead of time.
i say all this to reinforce and underline the thought that writing a realistic character who does not belong to one’s own type of individual is hard and requires work. it doesn’t happen by accisdent.
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The whole basis of writing fiction is to observe people and write about human nature from what you’ve observed.
If you don’t have anyone to observe and learn from, your characters will be 2-dimensional stereotypes. So while I totally agree with your recommendation for beta-readers, I think it needs to start a lot sooner than that. I think he needs to actually KNOW people IRL who aren’t just like him.
As you say, he’s rich and famous enough that he could easily just accept invitations from a wider circle of admirers to get started down this path. Why hasn’t he?
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Maybe not halfway through the story, but it does happen. Ripley in Alien was originally written as a man and Spock in Star Trek was originally written as a woman. The writing process can be very messy, and major changes can be made late into the process. Writers can scrap or add characters, scenes or even whole chapters well into the writing process.
But I am not suggesting an author write an entire book and then go back and decide the genders or races of characters. I am just suggesting that the author write a few scenes or conversations with the character before deciding everything about the character.
That’s not exactly true. The pilot for Star Trek had a woman as a first officer but she was an entirely different character. The network decided that the idea that putting a woman on the bridge was too far-out so instead they retooled the show to make the pointy-eared telepathic alien who had copper-based blood the first officer to keep the series more grounded and believable (because he had a penis).
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All right. I give up. I was wrong.
An author should determine as much as possible about each character, from race and religion to backstory and habits, at the earliest stages of character development and then do as much research as possible to understand the character’s own perspective based on those things, before beginning actual story writing. I can see why that works better.
Thanks in particular to @navarro for explaining all of this to me in the context of your own writing process.
And sorry to everyone else for being so obstinate. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but as always, there are people who know much better than I do.
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I’ve read too many SF books where the women were written as afterthoughts. Granted, these were Hard SF books, so the characters didn’t matter 
Spock was in the pilot along with her and they didn’t like him either, since everyone knows aliens are monsters…that’s why the salt vampire ended up being the first episode they aired too. My understanding is they basically compromised letting Roddenberry pick one of the two, and he decided that including the alien was more important to the vision of the show.
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Each and every character? Before they start writing?
No one here said an author needs to go that far. Why did you expand what others here have been saying in terms of race, and expand it that much?
It’s hard for me not to read your comment as sarcasm.
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The truth is, I honestly don’t know. I am not much of a writer, really.
I like to write short stories sometimes (nothing that I would ever show anyone, much less try to publish) just for fun, and I like to use a technique that I learned in a college creative writing workshop course. It works like this: I start by coming up with a character by deciding just one random thing about that person (i.e. “this is a guy who likes getting on his motorcycle and just driving off to somewhere he has never been before every weekend”) and then I gradually build from there, putting this character in various situations to develop him/her/they out even if most or all of the situations will never make it into the finished story.
I like that technique. I like that the character still has infinite possibilities when I start from that one random thing. I think that I just took it personally when people said that my writing technique was wrong, and that’s why I reacted in the way that I did. After sleeping on the matter (it really was 1am in Japan when things reached a head), I realized that it was wrong of me to try to shift the focus of the conversation from the very delicate matter of how to write while accounting for race and instead focus it on my silly little writing technique. I don’t know the best way to write. But I am sorry for derailing the conversation in that way out of stupid pride.
And I am glad to have received real advice on how to do it right from people who do know. I may continue to use my old technique for minor throwaway characters, but I will genuinely make an effort to write main characters the way that navarro and kii suggested, because I do see that I owe main characters that much.
I am sorry that my actions have caused you to think less of me. And I understand and take responsibility for that; it is my just deserts in this case. I hope to be able to show you that I can do better, but I realize that that burden rests entirely on me.
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