Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!
This week’s theme gave me pause for thought: Do you write diverse characters? If so, how do you avoid cultural insensitivity?
And remember to pay a visit to my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!
Wow, what a topic! And it seems more relevant now than ever before in the ever-changing world in which we live. I have one novel and a handful of short stories. Much of it hasn’t directly been influenced by culture or race or any of the myriad elements that make us up. My debut novel is set in an alternate world in an alternate timeline. It doesn’t specifically feature any known cultures, groups or races so I haven’t had to as yet handle diversity. That said, perhaps avoiding it is the easy solution to avoiding cultural insensitivity.
It’s not something I am actively concious of in my writing, it’s just that as yet I haven’t had a story that hinges on issues of diversity. It’s a tough area, and with little knowledge or experience of experiences outside of my own, I feel I wouldn’t be best placed to handle the subject matter. I am always open to learning, but I fear any attempt to write about other cultures, or matters of diversity, could be ill-advised.
I enjoy creating a narrative, and I love writing in the world I have created in my steampunk novel. I can create a world with cultures that I can craft from the ground up.
Steven Smith 
The great thing about creating a new universe and populating it is that you make the rules. You can have a world without prejudice, where everyone is different yet equal and nobody notices.
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Exactly. Creating your own worlds almost gives you a blank slate.
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Creating new worlds is fun. You can have a world with no racism or sexism etc.
Tweeted.
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Exactly. It was important for me that the leading male was balanced by the leading female. She is just as strong and important as he is to the narrative of my book.
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It’s hard to imagine a world with no racism or sexism. But it would be interesting to write.
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I feel like that could almost be as challenging as carefully handling those subjects!
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I enjoy dealing with the diversity issue in Daermad Cycle because I can say some things that I believe without being labeled a “racist”, “sexist”, etc. My husband says I was influenced by the original Star Trek series in that way. He’s probably right. The issues that separate my races in Celdrya are ultimately the same issues that separate us in the real world — fear of the other, competition for resources, substantive issues about cultures coexisting when they disagree on important issues, and then as a later consequence, trying to hold “them” responsible for things their ancestors did. I add a complication of the Kin being so much more long lived than the Celdryans that some of the Kin were actually harmed by the Celdryans ancestors, though not by any Celdryan still living. That was one of those — talking to myself through writing things — dealing with how you find forgiveness and reconciliation sufficient to forge an alliance when that is the history the two peoples share.
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