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Showing posts with label diversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diversity. Show all posts

Monday, April 1, 2019

How to be more diverse in your writing.

We live in a big world full of lots of different kinds of people - over seven and a half billion as of May 2018. Writing a novel (or short story, or anything, really), requires the author to focus on a much smaller population.

It's super easy for writers in the United States to default to having an all white cast. So how do we overcome this habit?

By taking a look at the world's statistics! I consider using these numbers as a good set of training wheels to help you until you write diverse characters in a more natural, intuitive fashion.

I always start with my geography - where does my story take place? For example, if you set your work in the United States, the racial population estimates for 2018 are:
  • 60.7% Caucasian alone
  • 13% Black alone
  • 18% Hispanic alone
  • 5.8% Asian Alone
  • 2.7% Biracial
  • 1.5% Indigenous, including Hawaiian, Native American, and Pacific Islander
 When you are writing a story, take a glance at these numbers and go, "Oh, yeah. Let's not forget the rest of the population!" It's okay if it feels a little weird at first. I know that I'm not very good at things in the beginning. It'll become more relaxed quite quickly.

Is your book going to take place in an international setting? Take a look at the world population.

Chart shamelessly stolen from Science Chat Forum
If you don't write people from Asia (Chinese and subcontinental Indian, especially) wandering your setting, you are really missing a huge portion of the population. For example, when I traveled to Istanbul, I stuck out because I was tall. I was constantly afraid I would run into a petite Asian woman by accident. When I wrote about my characters being in Istanbul, I made sure to comment on how very diverse the city is. If I had pretended that there were no world travelers in the huge city, I would have been doing my readers a disservice.

Relax, observe, and write. You got this!