Is my story "too diverse"?

Is it alienating to readers who are white and straight to be put into the shoes of someone who is drastically dissimilar to them?

Is it alienating for a modern American to read a story about medieval France? Or about short hairy-footed Brits who live in fantasy-land?

Those differences you mention are superficial. End of the day, a person is a person. Who is more drastically dissimilar to me - someone who is attracted to a different subset of people than me, or the medieval knight, for whom the entire frame of reference was different, since the natural order was that the person he married was not the person he loved, the person he loved was married to someone else, and sex was a sin anyway? Whose life is more different from mine - the person whose skin colour is different in my country, or the one who lived before the Industrial Revolution, and was probably illiterate?

If you can tell stories about medieval knights, you can tell stories about guys loving other guys. For that matter, surely one can tell a story set in Mexico? And surely the characters wouldn't be all blue-eyed and blond?

"Too much diversity" only becomes an issue when you start having characters that have no business being there, just so the minority is represented. Writing diversity should help you understand what I'm talking about, though it doesn't seem to be a problem with your story.

It is also helpful to remember that the "white" skin colour is not in fact the most common one in the world. Depending on where your story is set, it is the "everybody's white" preposition that might in fact be unrealistic.

posted almost 6 years ago

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Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3

I think you are fine provided that you do not bludgeon the reader with the sexual orientation of your characters.

I do not mind reading about characters that happen to be gay or bisexual as part of who they are, but I do dislike being preached to and told how normal this is. Fine, it is normal for that person - great - just use 2x4s for carpentry - not narrative.

I was reading one novel and quite enjoying it - until it became the story of a young man falling in love with another young man and it became explicit. The story stopped and the preaching began. I put the book down, not because the characters were gay, but because the author was trying to preach at me. We rarely listen to sermons. Falling in love - sure. The heart wants what the heart wants - just no sledgehammer required.

Just tell your story.

On a practical matter, if your story (post apocalyptic if I recall) involved a massive loss of human life, there would be pressure for every woman to bear children. There was a BBC series Survivors that dealt with the issue of repopulation as well as the reassignment of status.

posted almost 6 years ago

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Rasdashan‭

520 reputation 25 59 93 0

I don't think it's alienating, but it does press my suspension of disbelief a bit to have such a large fraction of the cast be LGBT characters. Gays are something like 3-5% of the population, with the rest of the letters being an even smaller fraction. Having a group of four LGBT characters with no heterosexual ones is unrealistic unless they are together because they are LGBT. Admittedly, a post-apocalyptic society would be fairly Malthusian and thus likely to put a large emphasis on reproduction, meaning them being outcasts for being LGBT is quite reasonable. So if something like this is part of their backstory, then that's totally fine. But if they're a group of survivors that just happen to fill in the acronym I'm going to be rolling my eyes.

The skin color thing would depend on where the story is set. For example, in post-apocalyptic America, just about any racial makeup is perfectly reasonable. Post-apocalyptic China or Russia, I'd be scratching my head as to where this diversity is coming from.

posted almost 6 years ago

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eyeballfrog‭

15 reputation 0 3 3 0

Creating characters with diverse backgrounds (sexual, racial, gender, etc.) should be worked into the story if it makes sense and it should be done well. Anything else would come off as low effort. Just putting them in the story for the sake of having the representation can positively affect the community but at the same time can open it up to criticism. This sounds like the type of story that the Alt-Right would co-opt as being perfect for a literal holocaust. If the character's were superfluous and shallow in nature would they be wrong?

posted almost 6 years ago

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Grumpy_Gay_Author‭

5 reputation 0 1 1 0

I don't think your diversity is a problem, however, from a writing perspective, I DO think that any special quality of a character should have some impact on the plot or the character.

So my answer is that A story can be "too diverse" in the sense that the author is specifying Jack is gay, but Jack being gay doesn't seem to have any effect on Jack's character and doesn't influence anything he does in the story.

In other words, if the minority status is superfluous it shouldn't be there at all.

I intentionally write many of my characters without race, and don't describe anything about them related to race. They have a gender, a height, a weight, a level of fitness, maybe an accent. Because I don't want their race to matter in my story, I don't want to have to come up with ways it might matter.

Being gay typically would determine some externalities like who you date or marry or live with, and how others treat you. It can affect mentality and interpretation of what people are saying. If I make a character gay, I want the character to have a gay life experience, a gay past (realization, coming out, first gay sexual experience), an anticipated gay future (dating, love, marriage, kids, whatever).

If none of that matters, there is little point in making a walk-on waiter gay if all he is going to do is take your order, deliver your food and vanish forever. His homosexuality is empty, it doesn't create diversity, it looks like checking a box on a diversity form.

I don't think you can have too much legitimate diversity, I do think a story can have too much token diversity.

posted about 5 years ago

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Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

The short answer is, there is no such thing as too much diversity!

Especially when authorship comes from the community being portrayed. So many times mainstream (i.e., white) writers/producers/publishers will look at diversity in terms of matching percentages. So if black people make up 12% of the US population, then make 1 in every 8 characters black (mostly in the background, and lower that percentage because what they really want is what they see in mostly white spaces). Other times, a creative team will include one of everything (from a short list) and pat themselves on the back.

But when non-mainstream characters are dropped in like chocolate chips in cookie batter, you don't really see them. Real diversity is about communities and cultures, not individuals. Sure, keep the individuals, but don't stop there.

When writers of color make their whole world look like them (or at least as the majority), something magical happens. Temper, Afar (comic), Kintu, The Hummingbird's Daughter (all these have a fantasy theme). Other stories are set within minority communities in a white country or are about another country, or set within non-mainstream communities that live in a straight and otherwise mainstream location.

The long answer is, sometimes authors try too hard.

Sometimes you want to highlight a particular community and that's totally cool. Other times you're trying to set a work within a larger community and you find yourself highlighting diversity in a way that overshadows the larger story.

I'll give an example from my own novel. 18 kids from the US time travel to ancient Egypt just before the start of the Exodus. Race and ethnicity is a huge part of my book. Those ancient Jews were not white and a lot of them were of mixed ethnicity. Plus there were a ton of converts from all sorts of backgrounds. My main character and her brother are 100% European Jewish. All the other kids are 1/2 or 1/4 Jewish.

My top characters include a brother and sister who are half black and half Jewish. I also had one sibling group that was part Mexican and another sibling group that was part Native American (they're from Arizona where both those groups are common). This added up to 9 kids who were in part not-white. Half of the total.

If I was just writing about these kids I might have left it as is. The problem is that it was important to my story to have the mostly-European travelers contrast with the Northern African/Middle-Eastern locals they hung out with. So I made the 1/2 Hispanic kids 1/4 Native American instead and made the formally 1/2 Native American kids 1/2 white (non-Jewish European). Now it's 5 kids with a non-European ethnicity.

I still have plenty of ethnic diversity to work with. Because it's mostly with the ancient Hebrews, it works even better to teach the travelers how to overcome their American ideas of who counts as a Jew and how race intersects. I couldn't have done that as well had half the kids been of color.

Gender, sex, and sexuality.

I struggled as well with lavender representation in my story. As I belong to this community myself, I have no desire to write a book where everyone's assumed to be straight. On the other hand, it's an upper middle grade novel. The oldest main characters are 14 (8th grade) and none of them are dating (yes I know sometimes kids that age do date, but mine haven't started yet).

The ancient Hebrew group has marriages and family units around traditional gender expectations. People weren't any less likely to be queer back then (you don't get a ton of rules against something that isn't happening), but it manifested in ways other than family structure. But since I'm focusing on kids (my MC is 12) and writing for kids (upper middle grade is about 8-12 years). And since I want to concentrate on issues of faith and ethnicity, I'm downplaying it all.

I'd be lying if I said I had no mixed feelings, but I am okay about it because it works for this story. If I told the story from the point of view of an older teen or an adult, I might showcase some very different things.

Just because I choose not to tell their stories doesn't erase their existence.

Duh, of course some of my characters are lavender. I didn't sit and try to figure out who; I asked them. (Yes, I'm in the stage where my characters tell me who they are.) Of those 18 kids, 2 grow up to be gay. One is 2 at the time of the story and the other is 14. The 14 year old is my favorite character because he's very complicated (and a total jerk). I show him with his husband and son in the epilogue when they're all grown up. Otherwise, it's not stated in the story. But is it there? Of course! I know what's in his head. I see how his eyes linger on certain young men. I feel his heart beat out of his chest when he's with his new best friend who is from Egypt. Readers who look for it will see it too.

So what about your story?

If it works for you as an author and it works for your story, then have them be who they are now. If it feels forced to you, then make some changes. Next, ask some beta readers or a writing group what they think. I did this with my spouse, whose comic book series just published its second issue (of 20). That story is an explosion of diversity of every kind. So when he told me he thought my US kids should be more European (for the reasons I stated above), I trusted that.

Will you alienate some straight white readers with your story? Yes. Yes, you will.

But every story alienates someone. I posted a couple questions about my story over on Worldbuilding and was shocked at the things that caused people to hate my story without ever having read it. My older kids weren't adult enough; they should take on adult responsibilities. My older kids were snot-nosed brats who couldn't possibly be helpful in any way. My MC couldn't be a leader because she was a girl. And so on.

And ya know what? It's okay. You can't make your story right for everyone. Make it true to yourself and make it publishable.

If you're honest with yourself and find that you're adding diversity in a way that doesn't work for your story, take it out.

If you find you're taking away diversity in order to appease imaginary readers, put it back in.

Find your balance and tell your story.

posted almost 6 years ago

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Cyn‭

1130 reputation 25 439 215 0