#writing outside your norm
Is is possible to write outside one’s own experience?
I would say yes. In many ways the experience of writing stories is an exploration of the world outside our own self, and necessarily so lest we only write autobiographical fiction (which some do, and which is fine as a genre). A major part of all successful human interaction comes in learning how to anticipate and comprehend the behavior of people who are not us (that is, every person, even those we are closest to).
However, writing (and comprehending) outside one’s own experience does not happen in a vacuum. In reality we live embedded in cultural surroundings. We therefore absorb expectations and beliefs from our families, communities, larger linguistic and national cultures (not everyone lives in the USA!), and from popular culture renditions of what the world is supposedly like based on dominant economic and pop-culture models. These expectations and beliefs often reflect distorted and false views of communities that exist within or outside the dominant cultures.
In the wake of current and recent online discussions of appropriation, disrespectful or stereotypical representation of marginalized cultures and groups, and the publication of J.K. Rowling’s (fictional) history of North American magic, I wanted to say a few things about writing outside one’s own culture and/or group.
I’m not an expert and I have made and will continue to make mistakes. Own your mistakes. Learn from them. Listen to others more than you talk yourself.
Don’t take space from people whose voices are more marginalized than your own. Listen.
Act with the same respect you would wish to be shown. If you are going to research a culture that is not your own, listen to the voices from that culture. Don’t grab for received wisdom and “what everyone knows” and images most prevalent in popular culture, because these stereotypes are almost always harmful. Don’t only seek out outside views of the culture whose analysis is more comfortable for you, even if it is couched as scholarship.
Ask politely. Be humble. If people don’t have time for your questions, then retreat gracefully. If they do have time, pay them when that is possible or appropriate. Thank them. Don’t take people for granted. Really, truly listen to what people have to say. People willing to be honest with you are giving you a gift.
No culture is monolithic. Individuals within a culture do not hold the same views and beliefs. People also have multiple ways of understanding themselves, measured against and lived within different aspects of their lives. As in rhythm, the gaps between beats are as important as the beats. Listen to what they may not be willing to say to you.
Pay attention to the details, to the elements of daily life that are often derided as trivial or too unimportant for “important” fiction. I often find the best windows into other ways of living to be the day to day experiences of the world, and the habits, interactions, languages, and rhythms that characterize people’s lives. These spaces are where most life is lived.
Be aware that you will be hauling your own expectations and stereotypes down this path. I don’t believe we can fully rid ourselves of this baggage–the biases, prejudices, and errors-taught-as-fact–but we can try to be aware of where and what some of those assumptions are. Examine yourself. Each day we can try to build for ourselves a new understanding and new awareness that reaches past them. On an individual level we really can only dismantle our own personal wall of prejudice and ignorance one stone at a time. Be determined.
Imagine a reader from the group you are writing about reading your story. How might they react? Is that what you want? Who are you really writing for? Are you using a culture as a stage setting or as an exotic or dramatically harsh backdrop for a story that will almost certainly mostly be read by readers not from that culture or group who won’t know any of the nuances of that experience and will be satisfied with broad brushstrokes as well as oversimplified and probably offensive generalities? Do you want to build your entertaining story atop other people’s pain?
What are your biggest fears?
Got them?
Alright, now think about your friends, your family, your significant other. What are their biggest fears? How do they differ from yours?
It’s easy to write about a character who’s afraid of spiders if you’re also afraid of spiders. But it’s a lot harder to write about someone with a fear of public speaking if you’re a natural public speaker. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
So, my challenge to you today is to write about your character’s biggest fear, and make it different from your own. Try and get inside their head and really understand what they’re feeling.
As creative writers, sometimes we need to stretch our muscles, step outside our stuffy little comfort zones, and try something new. Comfort zones are called just that because they are comfortable and safe. And while it’s scary to do new things and take risks, it’s the only way we grow.
We jump out of airplanes, talk to strangers at parties, and visit new countries when we want to face our fears and grow as people. But what can writers do to step out of their comfort zones and try something new? Here are a few ways to get started.
Switch POV. Try writing a story in third person, even though you’ve always been most comfortable in first.
Switch poetic forms. If you write narrative poetry, try a ballad, a palindrome, or a visual form of poetry. Or try your hand at romance if you normally write humor. Is there a writing style or form that has caused you problems in the past? Try it again and overcome your weakness.
Take something ordinary and make it unusual. Write a story about something terribly boring but with a twist—your toaster oven comes to life, or something incredible happens when you open your mail.
Try writing about something awkward, upsetting, embarrassing, or controversial. Tackle subjects like incest, religion, and STDs, or reveal your deepest, darkest secret in story form.
Switch story settings and put yourself in unfamiliar situations. Attend an evangelical church if you’re normally part of a super-sedate congregation—gain a new perspective on religion and how people worship. Or spend a few hours in an area of town you normally avoid and see it from a different view.
Make a fool of yourself. Step onto a crowded elevator and stand facing the others rather than the door—really experience the feeling of awkwardness. What reactions do you get? Or plant yourself outside a large store and be an unofficial greeter—observe how people respond to you.
Face a fear—and then write about it. Terrified of spiders? Visit the zoo and spend some hands-on time with some creepy crawlies. Or shut yourself in a closet and really tap into your claustrophobia.
Everyone feels more comfortable with what they know, and writers can easily fall into a habit of sticking to their comfort zones when it comes to literary form, genre, and theme. But these habits can block new and creative ideas. When a writer steps out of that comfort zone, either physically or in writing, there’s no telling what will emerge!
One of the most common questions that comes up around diversity is the issue of “Who can write what”—whether an author of one race can create a character of another, whether that character is then authentic, who gets to decide all this. When I’ve considered these situations as an editor, my judgment almost always starts with how much that writer is willing and able to radically decenter himself and his own privileges and biases in favor of those of his fictional character and culture, rendered in all its lights and shades … which also presupposes the writer has done enough research or gained enough experience with that culture to render the lights and shades authentically.
As an example, let’s suppose I just finished reading a manuscript written by a white woman but told from a Mexican-American teenage boy’s perspective, and overall, I liked the manuscript: I found the characters involving and multi-dimensional, the plot was fresh and smart and kept me turning the pages, the themes were woven deeply into the story and thought-provoking — and all of that would incline me toward acquiring it. But as a person who thinks a lot about diversity issues, I would at that point pause a moment and ask myself: Did the voice sound believable to me as that of a Mexican-American teenager, given the character and the world the author created around him? (Here I have to acknowledge that I myself am a white woman, and keep an eye on my own privileges, biases, and knowledge/lack thereof.)
How is Mexican-American culture as a whole portrayed within the book, and how are other cultures portrayed in contrast? Is any set of people all cartoonishly bad or uniformly good? (Sentimentality about a culture, and particularly about America’s or white people’s ability to help a “lesser” culture, can be just as offensive as ignorance of it.) Who drives the action and makes real change in the story? Is everyone portrayed with some complexity? (I should further specify that this concerns me most when a writer is writing about a protagonist or setting the book as a whole in a culture different from his/her own; multicultural secondary characters need to be believable and authentic too, but if we’re not so much seeing the whole world around them, the standards are a bit different.)
Supposing the book passed those tests, I’d then ask if I could have a phone conversation with the author. This is a standard part of my acquisitions process before I sign up a book, but it’s especially important when I’m talking with someone who’s writing cross-culturally. In that case, I say outright: “This is a tricky and sensitive subject. What led you to write this story, or to write the story from this perspective? What do you know about this culture? What’s the basis of your authority? What sort of research or interviews or experience have you accumulated? Has anyone from within the culture read it, and what sort of feedback did you receive?”
In the author’s responses, I’d listen for:
- Humility in the face of the above issues
- Thoughtfulness about them
- An openness to critique
- Not just by me, but by any vetters we might employ
- A willingness to work
- To go as far as she can in learning more about the culture and to revise to correct any missteps
- An openness to dialogue
- Being able to talk about these questions with me and with others as they come up
If these things are present, then I might go on and share the book with my colleagues here at Scholastic, and we’d figure out the next steps from there.
Four Ways to Write Outside Your Perspective
Too often, as a writer, it’s easy to throw in the towel and say: “I can’t write about that, it’s not my experience.”
Neither is slaying dragons, living in Victorian England, or surviving a pandemic. It would appear that experience is not necessary for an engaging narrative. In fact, we seem to want to read about people unlike us as often as people like us.
Writers are amongst the most creative professionals around, but for many writing a different sexual orientation, race, or gender seems daunting. Pulitzer prize winning author Junot Diaz once said that: “If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: You’ve gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women.”
I disagree with Diaz, but I concede the point that it’s difficult to write from a perspective you haven’t considered, yet men wrote many of my favorite female characters, and women have written some of my favorite male characters. Writing outside of your experience is a challenge, but one with rewards.
Unless you want a book filled with clones of yourself (you don’t) you’re going to need to write a cast. A cast of characters with differences creates a dynamic and exciting read with dialogue that pops and wants and needs that are often at odds. A clone army often sounds like the flock of seagulls from Finding Nemo. Seriously, that should not be what your cast looks like. No one wants to read this book.
So, what are some steps you can take to writing outside of your own perspective?
1. Start with a Beating Heart
You need to have a link to the inside of all of your characters. This is a place of commonality that allows you to understand what they’re thinking or feeling. It can be as simple as loving the same types of movies, or understanding what first love is like. Take honest emotions and use them to write your character.
Real people make the worst characters, but every character should have a touch of real in them. People that have changed your world are a great place to start.
A lot of discussion has been given recently to The Fault In Our Stars, so I won’t belabor this point, but the character of Hazel was inspired by a real girl. Esther Grace Earl was an early Nerdfighter who befriended author John Green. Like Hazel, Ester suffered from thyroid cancer. Green said that he was inspired by “Esther’s unusual mix of teenagerness and empathy: She was a very outwardly focused person, very conscious of and attentive to her friends and family. But she was also silly and funny and totally normal.”
Writing a book about a girl who has cancer but who isn’t defined by it, who is still a whole person, is the element that has been dubbed the most subversive to the legacy of cancer fiction that precedes it. Though John Green created a story that was wholly his own, he used real details from his friendship with Esther and also from his time working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital.
2. Bring Your Sparkle
One of my instructors at the New School gave our class some amazing advice that has changed my writing immeasurably. At surface level, it seems obvious. She told us to bring our ‘sparkle’ or the things that made us different and that made our narrative journey unique.
As writers, our urge is to connect and unite. Writers are great at building commonality. But as a result, we often shy away from exposing the things about us that we think people won’t find appealing. Our uncertainty, our struggles, or our upbringing are some of the things that made us, but they’re also the things that we’re the most eager to hide.
And we shouldn’t.
When Allie Brosh, author of the webcomic series Hyperbole and a Half, did a series of comics on depression, her readership exploded. As a reader of Hyperbole and a Half, it was astounding. Brosh’s comics were always amazing, but the episodes about her struggle with depression quickly became among her most popular. The Bloggess likewise has generously shared her experiences with anxiety, and has found an eager audience.
Think about it this way, are you more likely to make friends with: the person who says they like pizza or the person who loves the same strange cult classic movie as you?
People bond over unique experiences and shared weirdness, so let your sparkle show.
3. Get Out of Your Mind
“The most toxic formulas in our cultures are not passed down in political practice, they’re passed down in the most mundane narratives. It’s our fiction where the toxic virus of sexism, racism, homophobia passes from one generation to the next.” – Junot Diaz
Too often writers build characters based on stereotypes and characters that they’ve found in popular media. This is like building your house on a foundation of sand. Not only is it unbearably difficult, but one wrong move and the entire thing is going to crumble. Instead, do two of the things that authors are amazing at. Research and lose your mind.
Research what the life of your character would be like. Read books, read blogs, read novels outside of your usual repertoire. Then get out of your mind and into the mind of this character. Explore them the way you would any new character, figuring out their deepest wants, fears, and formative experiences. Once they feel real to you, start writing.
4. Avoid Tokenism
This might seem like the exact opposite of the rest of this advice, but don’t include diverse characters just because you don’t want to be accused of having a white heteronormative cast; do it because that’s the way our world actually is.
Look around next time you’re in the grocery store or taking public transit, (that fount of writer inspiration) and tell me that the world you see looks anything like the world portrayed in books or in movies.
So, don’t be afraid to write outside of your experience, but like all things in writing, do it well. These four tips should help you write realistic characters that fill out your cast of characters.
