Traci is the author of the critically acclaimed book We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lives in northeastern Oklahoma, where her tribe is located. Today we’re talking about her picture book Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer (Illustrated by Natasha Donovan).

Carole is the author of numerous award-winning books including the Newbery Honor book Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom (illustrated by Michele Wood), and R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul (illustrated by Frank Morrison). Today we’re discussing her picture book Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (Illustrated by Floyd Cooper).

When she’s not traveling or visiting museums, Carole is mining the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles. She lives in North Carolina.

In this episode Traci, Carole, and I discuss:

• Why they each decided to tell these forgotten stories as middle grade picture books.
• The deliberate and unique choices they made in structuring their narratives.
• How they created a distinct sense of time and place to ground their books.

Plus, their #1 tip for writers.

About Traci Sorell 

Traci Sorell is the author of Sibert, Orbis Pictus, AILA American Indian Youth Literature Award, and Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lives in northeastern Oklahoma, where her tribe is located.

You can find Traci on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.

Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer

Mary Golda Ross designed classified airplanes and spacecraft as Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s first female engineer. Find out how her passion for math and the Cherokee values she was raised with shaped her life and work.

Cherokee author Traci Sorell and Métis illustrator Natasha Donovan trace Ross’s journey from being the only girl in a high school math class to becoming a teacher to pursuing an engineering degree, joining the top-secret Skunk Works division of Lockheed, and being a mentor for Native Americans and young women interested in engineering. In addition, the narrative highlights Cherokee values including education, working cooperatively, remaining humble, and helping ensure equal opportunity and education for all.

About Carole Weatherford

Carole Boston Weatherford is the author of numerous award-winning books including and Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom, illustrated by Michele Wood which received a Newbery Honor; R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Aretha Franklin, The Queen of Soul, illustrated by Frank Morrison which won the 2021 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Book Award. When she’s not traveling or visiting museums, Carole is mining the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles. She lives in North Carolina.

You can find Carole on her website or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre

Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation’s history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa’s Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.

News of what happened was largely suppressed, and no official investigation occurred for seventy-five years. This picture book sensitively introduces young readers to this tragedy and concludes with a call for a better future.

If you decide to check out these books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links for Classified and Unspeakable where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 375: Bringing Omitted BIPOC History to Light through Middle Grade Picture Books – Interview with Traci Sorell and Carole Boston Weatherford appeared first on DIY MFA.

This year I spent a lot more time than any other year at the actual conference portion of the event instead of on the show floor. Don’t get me wrong, my feet were still killing me by the end of BEA from all the walking and visiting booths I did. But I spent more time listening in on the panels this year, learning about where the publishing industry is going, and then connecting with the people that I wanted to meet.

Overall, two main themes stood out to me at BEA this year: Identity and Community.

During a panel on big data and the publishing industry, Scott Galloway, founder and chair of L2, talked about the four big industries in our culture: Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. His prediction was that Amazon and Google will lose relevance while Facebook and Apple will gain relevance in the future.

When I stepped back and tried to think through why this might be the case, it occurred to me that both Facebook and Apple put community and identity front and center, while Amazon and Google don’t. It’s just not in their business model. If all the data is pointing for Facebook and Apple to continue to dominate, while Amazon and Google lose relevance, it seems to me that identity and community may be the key reasons why.

What else did I learn?

Brick and mortar bookstores are coming back!

This prediction came up on several panels and I see it happening all around. Indie bookstores are springing up everywhere again. Why? For one thing, we are what we read; books speak to a deep part of our identity. And as we share those parts of our identity, books become a center of community, a common topic to discuss and share our feelings about. It makes sense that indie bookstores would start popping up again, but with a new focus on creating individualized experiences for the customers, and serving as a center where the community can gather.

Print is not dead!

When Kindle came on the scene, a lot of people began to predict the death of the print book. People have been bemoaning the eBook revolution and dreading the day that printed books will go the way of the dodo bird. Yet a decade later, print is still alive and well.

The fact reminds that digital publishing hasn’t quite figured out how to give its customers the same experience they get from print. Physical books allow for a physical exchange of ideas, which again strengthens community. It’s so much easier to hand someone a book and say “Read this!” than it is to tell someone to click a link and download an eBook. Seriously, have you ever tried to share a book with one of your friends via Kindle? It’s a HUGE pain in the you-know-what.

Having a lot of information is not always useful.

You might think that information is power, but the truth is that having tons data is useless unless you know how to interpret it. The publishing industry is sitting on a mountain of unanalyzed data, and there aren’t common industry-wide standards for collecting, organizing and interpreting this data, so much of this information just sits there. Any stats geeks and analysts out there? This is an untapped career niche that I think will be in much demand over the next few years.

The other problem with having a lot of information is that you may get some valuable nuggets, but you also get a lot of noise, and it’s often hard to parse these out. Numerical data can only give you part of the picture. Without digging into the details you might miss valuable insights about who your customers are. Understanding your readers and how they integrate with the larger community is crucial and the numbers don’t always tell the whole story.

We Need Diverse Books

After realizing the panels at last year’s BEA were sorely lacking in diversity, a new movement was born: #WeNeedDiverseBooks. This movement held its first panel exactly one year ago at BEA 2014. Now, a year later, WNDB is still going strong. I enjoyed their panel discussion, and especially love their idea that diversity equals inclusiveness. There are many diversities and they all deserve to have a share of the spotlight. Again, individuality and community go hand in hand.

Multimedia in Publishing

I was really excited to check out new developments in multimedia and while there are some interesting things happening, we still have a long way to go. Most of the multimedia still seems focused around educational resources. I was excited to see multimedia being implemented in education because it allows for different learning styles, but would love to see broader applications in the future.

Where Do Writers Fit In?

Nothing happens in the publishing industry without writers. If community and identity are the main themes for publishing, that means that as writers we need to embrace these themes as well.

This means we need to let readers into our world. We must use social media, our blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, etc., to let our readers understand who we are and bring them into our world. Multimedia isn’t an end in and of itself. It’s one piece of a larger picture. It’s our job to think of new and creative ways for our readers to experience our stories

In the process, though, we also need to honor the ecosystem, the medium, where our story lives. We shouldn’t just copy and paste across platforms and expect our ideas to translate smoothly. Instead, we need to focus on the delivery system and target our content to how it’s delivered and who we’re delivering it to. The medium should serve the message, and not the other way around.

Finally, I always love looking forward at storytelling trends that I see on the horizon. I’ll focus on YA here, because it’s my favorite thing to read and it’s the area I know best. As far as trends go, things always seem to move in cycles. What’s important is to recognize why people are interested in certain trends at certain points in history.

From fantasy (Harry Potter) to paranormal (Twilight) to dystopian (The Hunger Games) to contemporary (The Fault In Our Stars), the last two decades have exemplified this cycle. We’ve seen a strong movement from fantastical and speculative stories to those that are grounded in the hear and now. I have a hunch that that the next step will be historical fiction because as we become grounded in the present, we start becoming interested in where we’ve come from. And of course, from historical fiction, it’s not a huge leap to to high fantasy where the whole cycle will start over again.

Through these shifts in genre popularity, I still think the themes of community and identity will crop up again and again. Look for a lot of underdog narratives and fish-out-of-water stories.

I know this is all really theoretical, not the usual nuts-and-bolts kind of predictions you might expect. But I find that those kind of predictions often really only reflect the surface of the industry. What I want is to challenge you to think about what the next big trend is going to be and–more importantly–why that will be the case and what implications it has for us as writers.

As always, I love hearing from you! Please join me in the comments section and share your insights on the future of the publishing industry with me.

Link to Episode 46

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome.

The post Episode 46: BEA Recap and Publishing Industry Trends appeared first on DIY MFA.

Last week was the National Book Awards and two things happened that set Twitter on fire. The first was Ursula Le Guin’s beautiful acceptance speech after being honored with a lifetime achievement award. In this speech she warned that “hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now…. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries–the realists of a larger reality.” Click the link to read a transcript of the speech in its entirety. It’s short and quite powerful.

The second thing that happened was that MC Daniel Handler (AKA Lemony Snicket) put his foot in his mouth by making racist jokes not once or twice, but THREE times during the ceremony. The worst insult of the lot was at the expense of author Jacqueline Woodson who won the National Book Award for young people’s literature with her book Brown Girl Dreaming. I won’t repeat any of the jokes here because I believe repeating such words (even to criticize them) only gives them more power. If you’re curious, just scroll through the Twitter hashtag #NBAward and you’ll get the gist.

I want to talk about our responsibility as writers and how both Le Guin’s words, and Handler’s words relate to this responsibility. What set most people off about Handler’s jokes was that they were racist, but the problem goes deeper than that. We’re not living in a time of slavery in the USA anymore. We don’t have segregated bathrooms, water fountains or seats on the bus. Racism–or any “ism” for that matter–is more subtle these days, but no less insidious.

The problem with jokes like Handler’s at the National Book Awards is that they separate people into categories according to race, gender, religion, etc. and that they put the label front and center and shove the human being into the background. These labels only serve to push human beings into neat little boxes; they are like a shorthand and they over-simplify the beautiful complexity of humanity. When we use words that are racist, or sexist or any other “-ist” it’s like we’re saying someone: “I don’t have time to see you as a full, complex human being, so I’m just going to slap a label on you and call it a day.”

As writers it is our duty NEVER to use such shorthand. Why? Because it wouldn’t be the Truth. Humans are not the color of their skin, the language they speak, the amount of money in their bank account, and so on. Humanity is messy, and complicated, and sometimes even contradictory.

In her speech, Ursula Le Guin upheld the responsibility of a writer: she told the truth. She reminded us that as writers we are “realists of a larger reality” and that our job will be to shine a spotlight on that reality. Handler’s words evaded the Truth, not because they were factually incorrect but by making these jokes, he put the label at the forefront and the humans into the background. As a person, he should have followed that old adage “if you don’t have something nice to say…” but more importantly, he failed his responsibility as a writer because he obscured the full human truth with labels and shortcuts.

There’s a movement now called #WeNeedDiverseBooks. It’s a Twitter hashtag, and a website, and they raise money to help bring more diversity to literature. Handler’s jokes made abundantly clear that a lack of diversity in publishing and books is still a huge problem. Interestingly enough, Handler chose to atone for his jokes by matching donations to #WeNeedDiverseBooks for one day. (My opinions on that score are a matter for a whole other discussion.) This organization is making great strides to address this issue and I applaud their efforts, but we need to do more. Just by labeling books as “diverse” automatically puts them in a category that’s separate from the rest of literature. Increasing diversity in literature is the necessary first step because we can’t show a full picture of humanity if essential pieces are missing from the story. But it is also only the beginning.

Once we’ve filled in those gaps, once we have more stories in our literary culture that reflect the diversity of our society, then we have to take another step and this one is even more important than the first. Inclusion is not enough. We have to tell the Truth behind the labels. We have to show people as individuals, and while they might represent diverse groups, they are not defined by those groups. It’s not so much that #WeNeedDiverseBooks. What we need are #BooksThatTellTheTruth. This Truth is not about shortcuts and labels; it’s not about pigeon-holing people and sorting them into neat categories.

Tweet this.

In eleventh grade, we had a unit in our history class called SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). One of our assignments was what I now call the “bubble” exercise. The teacher handed out a sheet of paper with five circles. We were supposed to put our names at the center of the page, then in each of the “bubbles” we were supposed to list a circle or group that we identified ourselves with. After taking a few minutes to fill out the sheet, we went around the room and everyone shared what they wrote down.

This was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life because as each of my classmates read what was on her sheet, I realized I had done the exercise completely WRONG. The “bubbles” that my classmates listed were things like their gender, ethnicity, social class, etc. I on the other hand, had listed the people in my life like: my family, my school friends, my music friends, my martial arts friends…  When I finished reading what I wrote, I said: “I guess I did the exercise wrong. I didn’t even write down that I’m Brazilian.” The teacher gave me this funny look that I didn’t quite understand at the time, kind of a half-smile like she was in on a secret joke that no one else in the class got.

That day at lunchtime, I overheard some of my classmates making fun of my answers to the exercise. Didn’t I understand that the whole idea was to be aware of my identity? How ignorant was I that I didn’t think to mention my dual-nationality? Apparently I couldn’t even label myself correctly (in fact, I was unable to label myself at all).

A year and a half later, understood my teacher’s secret joke. My guidance counselor let me read the recommendation letters that my teachers had written to colleges. One line jumped out at me and it was from that history teacher: “Gabriela refuses to be pigeon-holed, and she’s not afraid to tell the truth.” That was when I realized that point of that “bubble” exercise wasn’t to list out which circles we belonged in, but to challenge the very purpose of those circles in the first place.

As writers, we are given the privilege of our words being allowed to enter another person’s mind and to influence what they think and feel. Essentially, our words occupy someone else’s mental real estate and can influence and affect other human beings. This is a huge responsibility, and we must recognize as such. We must also be aware that our words are shaped by our experiences, that “rules” are often shaped by the contexts in which they exist.

We might all interpret Ursula Le Guin’s words in our own way, and our understanding of her powerful speech will be different depending on our individual experiences and who we are as human beings. However the heart of her speech remains the same across the board. Her words express hope and empowerment to writers. Handler’s words, on the other hand–whether we interpret them as racist or not, as mean-spirited or just plain stupid–they were words spoken in an attempt to prop one human being up while putting others down. No matter what context you put them in, the meaning at its heart is still the same.

Words are powerful, and writers have the opportunity to use that power for good. It’s our job to show the world as it really is, in all its beautiful complexity. It is our job to tell the Truth. Anything less than that is not enough.

The post Diversity in Publishing: We Need Writers Who Will Tell The Truth appeared first on DIY MFA.

At the same time, Chinese and Western cultures are based on very distinct belief systems and societal values (not to mention, the difference in the span of their respective histories is thousands of years apart). A concept like, say, individualism conjures up a range of emotions – or no emotions at all – depending on who you’re talking to. These differences, consequentially, are often reflected in their literature, and readers’ interpretations of books vary.

So what are some of these differences?

To answer this, I spoke with several avid readers who grew up in China but also understand English well and have experienced Western culture to some degree. It’s important to acknowledge that, aside from their cultures, everyone’s reading and life experiences are unique. But through their insight and reactions toward Western fiction, we get a glimpse of cross-cultural understanding and, ultimately, a reminder that appreciation for good books is universal.

Romance-in-the-Book

For many readers, there’s a major trade-off in reading Western fiction in Chinese: though Chinese editions are often easier to read, the author’s original tone and expression of emotions are often lost in translation. For the most part, though, the general plot and character dynamics are conveyed well.

Take “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks, for example. In this contemporary romance novel, the love between characters Noah Calhoun and Allie Hamilton is impeded by their class and socioeconomic differences. Instead, Allie is expected to wed Lon Hammond, a more appropriate suitor. Fred Wei, a Beijing resident, thinks it’s important for characters like Noah and Allie to follow their hearts rather than give in to conformity. He says Allie made the right decision by choosing to be with Noah – and that many people in China would agree, as more and more Chinese youth are prioritizing happiness over their parents’ satisfaction, especially when other factors like money aren’t an issue.

In reality, though, life doesn’t always end up like the books we read. Finances aren’t as easy a hoop to jump through as are family and social pressure. Wei notes that a hypothetical Noah and Allie living in China may not take the same route as the book’s characters. “The wealth gap is much bigger here in China,” Wei says. “If money and status are the only considerations here, and if this ‘Chinese Noah’ is like dirt-poor and from the countryside – or lives in a big city and cannot possibly buy an apartment there – I doubt our Chinese Allie would leave [Lon] for Noah.”

“The Notebook” isn’t the only romance novel Wei has enjoyed reading in English. It was back in high school that Wei read his first full-length English novel, “Women in Love” by D.H. Lawrence. Not only did he find Lawrence’s writing to be both provocative and philosophical, but it also possessed the right amount of subtlety. “The book blew my mind away with its candid description of sexual matters and human emotions – and it’s not done in a lewd, cheap way. It’s arousing, but not pornographic,” says Wei, now 31. Though Lawrence’s books caused controversy back in the 1900s for explicit material, for Wei, being able to read an English-written book like “Women in Love” in its original form is something to be appreciated – especially since Chinese translations may be revised due to censorship.

Wei says Chinese fiction tends to depict characters that are static and have fewer internal conflicts, while characters in Western fiction are more dynamic and complex. In that way, Chinese stories are more predictable and the motifs are often laid out for the reader. “The Western fiction that I’ve read are not so straightforward, and moral judgment is always left for the readers to make for themselves,” Wei says. “Even when there were stereotypical malevolent characters – like Rebecca [of “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier”] – the author didn’t draw moral conclusions by telling readers point-blank that a woman shouldn’t sleep around and taunt her husband.”

Of Political Mind

One classic historical romance novel that has garnered attention within the United States for decades is “Gone with the Wind” by American author Margaret Mitchell. This longtime favorite within the United States follows a vain young woman named Scarlett O’Hara whose well-to-do Southern family endures the economic consequences of the Civil War (1861-1865). Christin Guo, a college student in Beijing, China, says she learned about America’s Civil War from taking history in middle school. “[The war] made the slavery system abolished and contributed a lot to the development of America,” Guo says. “After I read the book, I was able to [understand] more about the problems of racial discrimination and the suffering that the war brought people.” Guo says she believes most people in China who have read “Gone with the Wind” enjoy it mostly because of its charming protagonist and her struggles with love and poverty rather than the historical context.

With a book that’s heavy with implications of politics, leadership and social order, such as the dystopian novel “Lord of the Flies” by English author William Golding, Wei says he thinks most Chinese people are inclined to interpret it more so through “the lens of human nature.” Most people living in China aren’t exposed to party politics the way Americans are, so the political significance of a novel isn’t immediately apparent, he says. In “Lord of the Flies,” a group of young boys are stranded on an island after a plane crash and create their own system of government, which only leads to savagery and even homicide.

To Wei, the many character deaths are Golding’s way of implying that the act of killing arises from dark, animalistic tendencies innate to all humans. “The twist comes in the end, when the boys are found by adults and it’s like snap! They’re back to their bright-eyed, innocent selves,” says Wei, who has also read “Crime and Punishment,” “Moby Dick,” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” among other novels. “I think it’s a satirical way of saying violence – though [it springs] from human nature, free of social restraint – is an adolescent, laughable abnormality if it were not so deadly, which can be put to right by more mature, authoritative people.”

Regardless of what country you’re from, he says, people who read “Lord of the Flies” are bound to find the characters’ behavior cruel and the book brutal and shocking. Similarly, Karen Xue, a graduate student at Boston University who grew up in Shanghai, China, says anyone who reads or watches “The Hunger Games” trilogy by American writer Suzanne Collins will probably have comparable reactions. Though she’s only seen the movies, she says the overall plot reminds her of World War II. “I guess with a general understanding of history and worldview, people would view [“The Hunger Games”] roughly the same, regardless of their cultural background,” Xue says.

Wei acknowledges that since he lives in a different time and place than the Western authors, he has to put aside his own cultural biases and moral beliefs, and keep an open mind while reading their books. “The beauty is in peeling away the superficial differences between the cultures and finding that, deep down, it’s all about the universalities of human nature,” Wei says.

As a recent graduate of UNC School of Journalism, Wendy Lu has written for a variety of print and online publications, including China.org.cn, The Daily Tar Heel, Raleigh Public Record and Chapel Hill Magazine’s The WEEKLY. In college, she served as the managing editor of UNC’s Blue & White Magazine and print co-editor for The Durham VOICE. Wendy is also a former publishing intern at Sleepy Hollow Books and a NaNoWriMo 2008 winner. Learn more about Wendy at https://wendyluwrites.com.

The post A Chinese Perspective on Western Books: Part One appeared first on DIY MFA.

Neither is slaying dragons, living in Victorian England, or surviving a pandemic. It would appear that experience is not necessary for an engaging narrative. In fact, we seem to want to read about people unlike us as often as people like us.

Writers are amongst the most creative professionals around, but for many writing a different sexual orientation, race, or gender seems daunting. Pulitzer prize winning author Junot Diaz once said that: “If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: You’ve gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women.”

I disagree with Diaz, but I concede the point that it’s difficult to write from a perspective you haven’t considered, yet men wrote many of my favorite female characters, and women have written some of my favorite male characters. Writing outside of your experience is a challenge, but one with rewards.

Unless you want a book filled with clones of yourself (you don’t) you’re going to need to write a cast.  A cast of characters with differences creates a dynamic and exciting read with dialogue that pops and wants and needs that are often at odds. A clone army often sounds like the flock of seagulls from Finding Nemo.  Seriously, that should not be what your cast looks like.  No one wants to read this book.

So, what are some steps you can take to writing outside of your own perspective?

1. Start with a Beating Heart

You need to have a link to the inside of all of your characters. This is a place of commonality that allows you to understand what they’re thinking or feeling. It can be as simple as loving the same types of movies, or understanding what first love is like.  Take honest emotions and use them to write your character.

Real people make the worst characters, but every character should have a touch of real in them. People that have changed your world are a great place to start.

A lot of discussion has been given recently to The Fault In Our Stars, so I won’t belabor this point, but the character of Hazel was inspired by a real girl.  Esther Grace Earl was an early Nerdfighter who befriended author John Green. Like Hazel, Ester suffered from thyroid cancer. Green said that he was inspired by “Esther’s unusual mix of teenagerness and empathy: She was a very outwardly focused person, very conscious of and attentive to her friends and family. But she was also silly and funny and totally normal.”

Writing a book about a girl who has cancer but who isn’t defined by it, who is still a whole person, is the element that has been dubbed the most subversive to the legacy of cancer fiction that precedes it. Though John Green created a story that was wholly his own, he used real details from his friendship with Esther and also from his time working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital.

2. Bring Your Sparkle

One of my instructors at the New School gave our class some amazing advice that has changed my writing immeasurably. At surface level, it seems obvious. She told us to bring our ‘sparkle’ or the things that made us different and that made our narrative journey unique.
As writers, our urge is to connect and unite. Writers are great at building commonality. But as a result, we often shy away from exposing the things about us that we think people won’t find appealing. Our uncertainty, our struggles, or our upbringing are some of the things that made us, but they’re also the things that we’re the most eager to hide.

And we shouldn’t.

When Allie Brosh, author of the webcomic series Hyperbole and a Half, did a series of comics on depression, her readership exploded. As a reader of Hyperbole and a Half, it was astounding.  Brosh’s comics were always amazing, but the episodes about her struggle with depression quickly became among her most popular. The Bloggess likewise has generously shared her experiences with anxiety, and has found an eager audience.

Think about it this way, are you more likely to make friends with: the person who says they like pizza or the person who loves the same strange cult classic movie as you?

People bond over unique experiences and shared weirdness, so let your sparkle show.

3. Get Out of Your Mind

“The most toxic formulas in our cultures are not passed down in political practice, they’re passed down in the most mundane narratives. It’s our fiction where the toxic virus of sexism, racism, homophobia passes from one generation to the next.” – Junot Diaz

Too often writers build characters based on stereotypes and characters that they’ve found in popular media. This is like building your house on a foundation of sand. Not only is it unbearably difficult, but one wrong move and the entire thing is going to crumble. Instead, do two of the things that authors are amazing at. Research and lose your mind.

Research what the life of your character would be like. Read books, read blogs, read novels outside of your usual repertoire. Then get out of your mind and into the mind of this character. Explore them the way you would any new character, figuring out their deepest wants, fears, and formative experiences. Once they feel real to you, start writing.

4. Avoid Tokenism

This might seem like the exact opposite of the rest of this advice, but don’t include diverse characters just because you don’t want to be accused of having a white heteronormative cast; do it because that’s the way our world actually is.

Look around next time you’re in the grocery store or taking public transit, (that fount of writer inspiration) and tell me that the world you see looks anything like the world portrayed in books or in movies.

So, don’t be afraid to write outside of your experience, but like all things in writing, do it well.  These four tips should help you write realistic characters that fill out your cast of characters.

…………………

Meghan Drummond graduated from Virginia Tech, and is currently an MFA student at The New School, the curriculum coordinator for DIY MFA, and a young adult writer.

The post Four Ways to Write Outside Your Perspective appeared first on DIY MFA.