Ten Authors Examine Their Characters
The Sensitivity Read
Jennifer Weiner, In Her Shoes
In my 2004 book, Little Earthquakes, one of the characters is a woman of color. Looking back, what I probably did is I imagined a privileged white woman and poured this black woman inside of her. My last book was the first I’ve worked on with a sensitivity reader. Harold, an African-American character in Mrs. Everything, is one of my women’s happy endings. I’d look at blogs and social media and talk to black friends. The sensitivity reader pushed me on the specifics: When my character’s in bed with him, what is his body like? What is his hair like? Because that’s going to be different than it is with a white guy. You have to put who you are aside and imagine as best you can every detail of that person’s experience.
Scouring Tumblr
N. K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth trilogy
It’s all the same craft. What changes is our willingness about what to prioritize. Fifty years ago in science fiction, if you got the physics wrong, your name was mud. Nobody gave a damn about race or gender. Everyone was a white guy, and if you wrote a woman, she was a white guy with tits. Now it’s a writerly virtue to get people right. I sometimes hang a lampshade on race; the truth is, when you walk into a room and you see a bunch of strangers, the first thing you notice is their appearance, their race and gender. So when I first describe a character, my narrator will immediately think, She might be Latino, oh maybe not, she might be Indian. I render that mental process.
I’d rather be accused of being obvious than
allow people to think all my characters are white. You’re not going to be perfect. Ehiru, a character from The Killing Moon, is asexual, and I don’t think I explored that well. I figured this out by reading Tumblr.
My Metaphysical Device
Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds
In order to write about America honestly, I have to step outside myself. Maybe because I can’t help trying to protect myself. The Newlyweds is about a woman from Bangladesh who moves to Rochester. The book was inspired by this woman, Farah, I met on a plane who was moving to the U.S. She’d found her husband on a site designed to connect Western men with Eastern women. We exchanged information, and she spent a bunch of time emailing with me. In the book, I gave the character I based on Farah (whom I named Amina) a cousin, Kim. She writes something for her for an essay contest, to help her win scholarship money. Kim is using her more capable English to help her friend. That was the metaphysical device I used to signal to the reader that this is me writing Farah—it’s never going to be her.
Scarier Than Writing White
Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman
My feelings have changed since I wrote my first book, which is partly in the voice of a racist Yankee heiress. I’m not sure I want to keep exploring blackness in relief with whiteness. I’m still interested in writing the other, though. The project I’m working on now is about black Americans and Haitians, and that’s scarier than writing white. In this project, I’m looking at identity in a different context from any I’ve lived in—it’s set in the 1870s. I’m very worried about getting it wrong, especially knowing I’m writing about a country that’s often written about through a very biased lens. Even doing research on it, it’s difficult to find emotional and historical truths. That’s why I’m doing it—because it’s a challenge.
250 Pounds
Victor LaValle, The Changeling
My fourth book, The Devil in Silver, was the first where I wrote a white protagonist. I started by imagining a different body. The main character, Pepper, he’s six-four, 250 pounds—and I’m not that. I do have a best friend who’s six-four, and at the beginning, when I thought about Pepper, I was thinking about my buddy and what it’s like when he’s walking through a door, having to lower his head a little bit. I thought about the space Pepper would take up when he enters a room—how much that body communicates before he gets a chance to say anything—and that turned out to be my way into writing many different others. I can’t imagine how anyone’s interior life is not formed by the body they got born into.
Inhabiting a Racist
Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
In The Other Americans, I have one character who’s an outand-out racist. I knew that anyone who ends up where this guy ends up must have had certain things happen in his life. This guy has a troubled relationship with his father. When he’s a teenager, he meets this older guy, a racist man, who becomes a surrogate father. It sounds like I sat down and wrote it down in one day, but this book took nine drafts and four and a half years. Once I have a draft, a question I always ask myself is, If I were to remove the research, all these details about an event or place or culture, what’s left? The hope is you’re left with a human who feels real.
Cross-Racial Longing
Jess Row, Your Face in Mine, White Flights
My novel Your Face in Mine is about a white American who undergoes racial-reassignment surgery and becomes a black person. I do think there’s a relationship between longing to be black, and the decision, as a white writer, to write outside one’s own identity. I’ve always experienced cross-racial longing, and that translates into my fiction. When I went out on the road with Your Face in Mine, a student asked me a version of that question: “How can you be comfortable writing from a nonwhite perspective?” I said to the student, “That assumes I’m comfortable writing from a white perspective, and I’m not.”
The Inevitable Failure
Monique Truong, The Book of Salt
In my historical novel The Sweetest Fruits, I write about three women of color from different places and times and backgrounds, all different from my own. They’re connected by a white writer named Lafcadio Hearn. I was drawn to Hearn because he was a traveler, and he took the reverse journey I did as a Vietnamese refugee. When I began reading about him, I noticed there was something horribly deficient in the way the women in his life had been written about. The one who concerned me most was Alethea Foley, an African-American woman and former slave who moved to Cincinnati and was married to Hearn. I knew she was prohibited from learning to read and write because of her enslavement, and I had to think about how that would shape her voice. There is an inevitable failure in my trying to write these women. We have that desire, and the tension is: Why do we do it? Do we do it for
ourselves? Does it make us feel better? Are we rescuing a bird or something? I think a lot of it is for ourselves.
The Inevitable Critique
Sarah Schulman, The Cosmopolitans
I’ve been told I got it wrong. Jacqueline Woodson told me I was wrong to have one of the protagonists in Shimmer be concerned by a biographical detail— that her black grandfather was once married to a white woman. She said a black person wouldn’t be hung up on this. I thought, Okay, I didn’t have the awareness to be accurate. It motivated me to work harder, although her statement has since been contradicted by other people. That’s the thing. There is no monolithic black opinion. It’s about being in conversation with people. But that only goes so far. I can never be in a room where there are only black people because as soon as I walk in, that’s ruined.
A Supernatural Experience
Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines
I feel nervous even now talking about this. The choice to write a protagonist of color in Underground Airlines was dictated by the idea for the novel: to interrogate contemporary racism by using speculative fiction. The protagonist is a former enslaved person forced to work for the government enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. As I revised, lines of dialogue rang false. I tried to make them more specific—not just,
This is how a black person talks, but this man, how does he talk? Creating a character is this weird combination of craft and a supernatural experience. The idea that anti-black violence is a “black issue” lets white people off the hook. Like, I hope they figure that out, I’m going to write my memoir of being a 40-year-old Jewish guy.