Back in the day, they used to portray people as stereotypes - and that’s offensive. We should be mindful now of how we draw people today so as not to encourage stereotypes. This applies to everyone - people of colour, people with disabilities (including hidden disabilities), LGBTQ+ relationships, people from different backgrounds. Everyone. The same goes for settings - not everyone lives in the country the way they did in Enid Blyton’s books (which I love for the nostalgia I connect to them - I don’t necessarily remember the stories, but I remember the escape they provided for me - but they are definitely of a time where racist, classist and ableist language was widely accepted as perfectly fine. Not everyone from a working class background is striving to be middle class or unhappy with their lot.
This is far more likely to happen if you are writing about a group that you know nothing about. There has been a lot of debate about this over the past few years and all I can do is share my interpretation of writing about people with a different background to your own. This is just my (simplified) view:
If you have substantial lived experience within a community, you should able to portray that community as you have experienced it. If you have no/limited experience within a community, you are going to write a fictive version of that community and it will feed into an untrue representation that is unhelpful to that community.
The big question is, what does substantial/limited mean to you? You need to figure that out before creating any of your main characters.
A quick example of this: I have Nigerian heritage - about 12%. I have never lived in Nigeria, nor been brought up in a household that follows any Nigerian customs. I am white. I have no lived experience of being Nigerian in the sense of experiencing the culture first hand. I can write about my feelings on being white with Nigerian ethnicity, but that’s something different.
(I can discuss this in more depth on Patreon, but this Substack will get very long and debate-y if I attempt to do that here).
So, a good thing to do now is look back on your own experiences. What have you experienced that you could bring to your writing? Spend some time reflecting and recording details and stories about your own childhood joys and fears, incidents, moments, experiences, sparks of inspiration, family, spaces - that kind of stuff. You are interesting enough - you don’t need to encroach on other cultures. It’s fine to write about a place - maybe you went on holiday to India - but focus on how you saw it through your eyes, don’t try and tell a story in the voice of someone who lives there based on two weeks all inclusive in peak season.
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