Writing an Identity Not Your Own

July 15, 2024
Novelist Temblador (Half Outlaw), who identifies as mixed Latine, delivers a valuable handbook explaining how authors can responsibly write characters whose abilities, class, gender, race, or sexuality differ from their own. Offering candid reflections on her own struggles to create respectful representation, Temblador recounts completely revising a Vietnamese character’s dialogue after deciding the character’s fragmented English was offensive. Rather than indicating an accent through phonetic spellings of dialogue, Temblador suggests it’s usually better to just “label the accent for your readers” (e.g., “Her accent pointed to South London”). Drawing lessons from problematic works of fiction, Temblador emphasizes the importance of fleshing out each character and criticizes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for describing African people as an undifferentiated, “beastly” mass. Throughout, Temblador urges writers to read as many books as possible by authors from the background they wish to portray and to “build authentic relationships” with those communities. An extensive list of problematic genre tropes will help writers spot insensitivities in their work (she suggests, for instance, that monocultural alien races in sci-fi reflect the failure of white colonizers to recognize the diversity within other racial communities), and Temblador’s reckoning with her own blind spots sets an example for probing one’s biases without defensiveness or ego. This thoughtful guide brings clarity to a fraught topic. Agent: Mary Moore, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc.