IBARW: Writing characters with a different background to your own

[winter]

I was meaning to write this post for ibarw (International Blog Against Racism Week) last year, but other matters got into the way. The advice is still valid - I saw the discussion in Elizabeth Bear's LJ on a similar topic: how do you get around to writing those same characters of colour/ethnicity/religion etc and not commit the same mistakes everyone is chastising commercial media for?

The following is a roadmap of sorts to a character of a different background than your own.


Assume you've found a place in your story for such a character. Or they showed up and now you have to put up with this strange person and his Armenian ways until you write his story and get rid of him and his rocket-launcher. The hardest way is when you consciously try to include someone non-Western-white because you've read the ibarw archives and it shook you to the core.

The first tenet is that they're people, too. For a moment, as you plan your piece, forget about racism and discrimination - and all the preconceptions that come with it. All the stereotypes. Instead, think of why this is more difficult for you than writing a character of the same ethnicity, class, religion and culture as your own.

You're not sure what makes them tick. But the underlying structure is the same (and if you deny that, there's really no point in trying to write inoffensively). A child is born; it grows in an environment that shapes it. What is the family you envisage for this character? Where did they learn or study? What friends did they have, who was the first crush, who was the person they looked at and said "I want to be like them"?

These are the questions you should ask yourself about any character. The only difference is that with one that parallels you, you can draw on your own experience. Maybe you didn't watch Beverly Hills, 90210, but you know girls who did, and you know what they talked about. When I talk about Kamienie na szaniec and its importance in perpetuating the knightly Polish mythos, you have no idea what that means.

Now, start digging.

Personally, I've found books to be the best way to immerse yourself in a culture. The advent of the inner monologue lets you understand not just actions, but the reasons for them. Find the book that parallels your character's upbringing, or a book they would have read. If you're writing about a different ethnicity in your own country, you can walk into your neighbourhood bookstore and find those very books. You don't have to read a ton; simply enough to be certain of what that culture really is, as opposed to your own preconceptions of it. (Needless to say, try to find an insider's view. Trying to write of African culture based on the diaries of most Victorian explorers will get you stoned.)

An anthropologist would be better able to define a culture, but from a writer's perspective it informs the moral code, the imagery, and the interaction patterns of a character.

On the moral side, it helps to define a hierarchy of sins and virtues. Note that your character might not subscribe to them directly, but somewhere in the back of her mind there's a mother (or grandmother, or nursery matron if he's a Russian raised in 6-day nurseries and only seeing his mother on Sunday, his father not at all) telling her "this is bad". Or "this is good", and there is a moment of warm pride. The fallacy here is to rely on quick descriptions in guidebooks; there are more nuances to cultures than that. Personally I prefer books here, in particular the great historic epics of a culture. They tend to show both the accepted morality for at least the social class of choice, and the consequences of going against it. You have to update it for a modern setting, but under the surface, it's there.

The imagery is the easiest. Song lyrics may help you, but so will advertising copy. Going one step deeper, especially for educated characters, requires reading the set texts of a culture, the ones they would study in school. Shakespeare for Anglosaxons, Pushkin for Russians, Goethe for Germans. You want the metaphors, the analogies, but the attitudes as well. Thunder may evoke a vampire's castle for you, but for a Japanese person it may just paint a summer storm.

Interaction patterns are the hardest, and you may not be able to escape anthropology texts. Or you may just watch a soap opera (or read a sprawling family saga) with a discerning eye. If possible, try to find one where the writers and producers were of the same culture as well. (Here is where writing Venezuelans gets easy.) If you can find books or sites advising children of your own culture in dealing with parents of the culture you're researching, they can be a godssend as well. Who does a person of this culture, gender, position talk to? Who do they ignore? Who do they listen to quietly? How has it changed since they were children?

And now that you have those three things defined - mix them up. You know your character's personality; what do they think about them? Do they go along, rebel, ignore? Dumped in another culture, will they try to consciously learn, or just assume that the guy working in a mortuary is a Dalit they should avoid touching? As always, there may be a middle-ground - shaking that hand, but flinching. It can give a richness to your plot, or even a jumping point to a whole new story.

I've found that the most effective use of non-Western-white-American characters is the one where you don't stress their Black Panther membership or the samurai swords on the stand by the door. The point is not to dump those details into your story, but to filter the character through them and arrive at their individual balanced, culturally-informed worldview. It's when you go that deep, to the cultural layer just above the personality foundation, that good characters happen.

And now that you've done that homework, why not apply it to others? Just because a French person is white doesn't mean that they have the same culture as the white American (and if you try to convince them otherwise, they'll puncture your eardrums with words alone). Class comes with a culture type of its own as well, as does sexual orientation in many places, and many places on their own; I read a fascinating article about South USA child beauty pageants recently. This is an exercise to do each and every time you write a major character of another background of your own.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not American. I am Caucasian, Polish with various other bits mixed in. At age 9 I spent half a year in a Paris classroom for new immigrants; it stripped any prejudices I may have had before and caused me to hurl several 19th century children's books at the wall, hard. I have a library and RSS subscription list that makes inroads at following my own directions, especially when writing Americans. They are very strange people.

Comments

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Here is where writing Venezuelans gets easy

Yeah, humble but pretty and honest girls get married into old money families everytime in Venezuela where they are lorded over by snotty in-laws. Some of them even have a indigenous comic relief servant around /snark

You realise that that would be the equivalent of basing your American characters on Falcon Crest or Dallas, and your Spanish ones on Médico de Familia or Los Serrano? We snark all the time about the unrealisticness of those series, using them for cultural details would be potentially disastrous because you could miss where they are realistically depicting cultural elements and when they are way off.

[winter]

You may note I didn't advise basing whole characters on it. Interaction patterns is who talks to who. Do the women and men talk separately? Do adult children and parents discuss things together, or just the mother and daughter, or children of both genders with just the mother (or just the father)? How is courtship realised in its ideal aspect, and how when it's supposed to provide for drama? Are things discussed outright, or in metaphor?

Soap operas tend to present the typical in these aspects, since they aim for mass appeal - they're actually used in anthropology and cultural studies, especially ones analysing the change of attitudes over time; when something makes it into soaps, this means it's not a taboo anymore, but something you'd at least mention over the dinner table, if you have one. After correcting for the idealisation, it's not a bad approximation.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Culebrones are heavily bowdlerized and sanitized. It's what the middle class would like their fairytales to look like, but it's by no means a realistic depiction of society.

I mean, it's not like I've paid much attention to culebrones (I already became fed up with them in the mid-90s with Cristal and its epygones), but then you get the writer of many of them in Spanish TV... and yeah. It's all about kitsch.

(Edited to add: And magic realism isn't exactly realistic, either, so be careful with your copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude)

[winter]

And yet kitsch is a good source of information about a society, or a section of it. If one is aware that it is kitsch, of course; I think no modern person needs to be told soap operas are so.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Good. Now how can a total stranger to the culture tell what is realistic, what is the (female, 50 years old, very sheltered) writer's idea of family life and romance (that she learned from 30-year-old TV series in turn), and what is the kind of batshitinsane stuff you usually find in culebrones to advance the plot... that's the difficult part.

[winter]

I've found common sense and comparing material to be quite useful in that regard. But the point is not to find a realistic depiction of life, but of culture. You mentioned fairytales before: they too depict the idealised and unrealistic concepts, but they're concepts that matter. You're "supposed" to wait for your prince charming to rescue you, and not take things from strangers, and be meek and nice so that you'll be rewarded; these things are not "right" in a modern moral sense, but they're tenets and lent insight as to what a character would have been told to be like - at home, in school, or by consuming media.

No sane person would expect a modern Western woman to behave the way people behave in Disney movies, but there is a good chance she's watched them and they shaped some part of her cultural background. If a man invites her to dance at a party, for example, she won't consider it an offense to her modesty. Presumption, maybe, but she won't call on a family member to avenge the slight.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but you won't get from TV that someone inviting someone else to dance with a "¿bailas, prenda?" ("Wanna dance, baby?") at this time and age unironically would have to be totally viejuno (it used to be "carroza", but that's outmoded now and so viejuno). Even if you got it from that awesome and edgy Almodóvar movie from the 80s.

It's just that I'm mentally replaying the idea of Spanish people that one would get from our media (and, oh, our dear romantic comedies), and... no, just no.

And you know, we already did the whole "character behaving in the real world as characters in our popular mass media do" bit in the XVIth century, and it's called Don Quixote. That may influence a bit my position in this debate.

[winter]

And again, where did I say that characters are to behave exactly as in meass media? You have to admit that if no-one watched them, those series wouldn't get made. Therefore, distorted and emphasised, they respond to some social need. It might not be the need of your pocket of society, or your class, but the hypothetical character in question would move in a society where some people watch those.

(And sometimes, a lot of people do. You wouldn't believe my office when someone brings up the new episode of some Soap That Will Not Die...)

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

What I am trying to say is, you are only going to be able to tell a foreign culture's realistic elements, in-jokes, exaggerations, aspirations, outdated mores and so on when you have enough knowledge to not need references from mass media. That's why it's a self-defeating approach. You'd be better off asking directly to locals, or getting them to beta or comment, even hanging around forums for ex-pats in that country to see what they find weird about the local culture.

/Has just had the second coffee of the morning, still sleepy, sorry.

[winter]

*blinks* What do you define as culture, then, if not things reflected in media produced by that culture? You can find all of the above in books, movies, television and blogs. It's not less valid simply because it's fiction.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Okay, example.

Say you see this cartoon about Barack Obama not visiting Spain during his European tour. A ha. It's got Zapatero as a country bumpkin under welcome signs. We're so primitive and backwards, nobody notices us.

But it happens to be a reference to this scene from Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall. In that movie, a village in the plains of Castile decides to get an Andalusian makeover to look more Spanish when those Americans from the Marshall Plan come to shower their European allies with money. In the end, the punchline is that the Americans drive along and don't even stop by the village. In the cartoon, Zapatero is depicted as the village mayor, played by Pepe Isbert (who, by the way, gets some memorable lines in the balcony scene -- "As the mayor of the village that I am, I owe you an explanation, and this explanation that I owe you I am going to pay, that I as mayor of the village that I am...", etc).

And you won't even get why *that* is funny unless you know about the literary genre of the esperpento, a form of veeeery black humour local to these parts. And to know *that*, one has to have had a college course on Spanish lit.

And some knowledge about Spanish comunidades autónomas, and why Castile and Andalusia are, like, totally different. And the way media during Franco's regime would treat Andalusian folklore as if it applied to all of Spain, and how Andalusian genres like coplas and flamenco would reign supreme in popular media. That's the cultural background that makes the initial cartoon and the movie funny.

Sadly, a half-hearted effort at portraying cultural elements ends up like this, with mariachi music, Mexican accents, and Pamplona as a small, dusty Mexican village instead of the 200,000 inhabitants city founded by the Romans in the colder, damper parts of Spain. My co-workers and me had a fun time when we were shown that commercial :P

[winter]

Maybe I'm being dumb today, but I still don't quite see how it relates to how a non-Spanish writer can essay writing a Spanish character's viewpoint - assuming a non-Spanish setting, like another planet - with a better chance at accuracy than, say, the average bullfights-and-flamenco approach, or assuming they have the same background as an American character. (Personally, I think Perez-Reverte's books gave me a fair approximation of one kind of character viewpoint possibility; Almodovar's films, another, and so on.)

[valancystar.livejournal.com]

Looking into all sorts of media and culture that is available strikes me as a good solution. I at least didn't get the impression you were saying one can get the whole truth of a certain culture from soap operas, just that they, with the way they usually deal with emotions, love affairs and family relationships, provide one example of how people in a different culture behave. Soap operas of course don't tell the truth of anyone's life, but you can certainly get some idea of different cultures when you ask yourself how their soaps are different from our soaps.

Certainly the image shown by mass media and popular culture isn't the whole truth, but it tells about the culture in which these people grow up. I would certainly hate it if someone supposed that Finnish people are exactly like depicted in some of our movies and TV series, but at the same those do get at certain true things. The way Finnish people are rather quiet and reserved, and relatively undemonstrative, will come across from popular culture. Something one would also notice is that excess drinking is depicted a lot in our popular films etc. It would be false to assume from this that all Finns drink lots and are comfortable from this, but it would be correct to think that binge drinking is to a certain degree "expected" and considered normal here. And someone who would look at all these movies where people drink lots, either as a solution to problems or a way to have fun, could ask: "So, what does this mean for the kind of person who doesn't like to drink? How estranged will they feel in social life when they don't share this part of what is considered normal behaviour?" Or they could just note that it's particularly likely a character in a certain situation would turn to drinking as a solution. It depends on the character how they will be affected, but the cultural background affects the character in any case. And often it's just from mass media and pop culture that we get these ideas, or at least they strengthen those ideas.

Of course, all this requires intelligence, media reading skills, critical attitude imagination, and the ability to ask questions and look at things from different points of view. But I think that these would be necessary to a writer in any case.

I don't know if my ramblings made any sense, I'm rather headachy at the moment and not thinking well, so I apologise for any incoherence and the length of this comment. But I wanted to say that what you said sounded reasonable to me, and that one should use all sorts of cultural resources and realise everything that is available: not just non-fiction anthropological explanations of the other culture but also immersing oneself into the kind of media and culture that these people would be exposed to. Of course actually talking to people from the said culture is a great idea, if they're available (with historicals it's not so doable), but they may not even be aware of everything, being too used to their own culture, and in any case a limited number of people can't cover everything, so doing your own research in cultural products is a great idea. Thanks for giving me ideas here of how one can look for various sources, also those that one may not think of immediately.

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

Well, except that AP-R can't write a male protagonist worth shit who isn't an obvious self-insert with the random Love Interest as an avatar of the Inscrutable Feminine Archetype. Well, possibly for The Queen of the South, but that's the exception... and Pedro Almodóvar writes batshit insane characters and situations, and was the author that I had mainly in my mind before because he's the one most well known outside our borders — seriously, don't.

/Has flashbacks of Carmen Maura setting a bed on fire and getting soaked in the street in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, and Alaska pissing on Carmen Maura in Pepi, Lucy, Bom y otras chicas del montón. Oookay.

[winter]

I think the main thing is to assume that the writer reading the post above is mildly intelligent and does not copy outright.

*curses add-ons for picking wrong icons*

[sukeban.livejournal.com]

"Mildly intelligent" does not describe the average fanficcer, you know, and less so someone who is willing to describe a foreign culture based on half-understood media products for local colour because reading up sociology books is so hard :P

[winter]

Quite frankly, I'd fear describing someone else's POV (as I reiterate, NOT the culture - this is for the people afraid to put an Asian person in a fic because they're OMGsoDifferent) based on sociology and anthropology books that describe averages as gospel.

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post, and I don't mean to rag on you or anything, but I wanted to make sure I understood this part correctly:

Personally I prefer books here, in particular the great historic epics of a culture. They tend to show both the accepted morality for at least the social class of choice, and the consequences of going against it. You have to update it for a modern setting, but under the surface, it's there.

Relating this to my own background, are you saying that you would read the The Song of The Nibelungs to determine a modern day German's morality? You're talking about between 700 (to over 1000, if we're counting the predecessors) years of distance here, I'd think it's fair to say some things have changed since then.

[winter]

I guess I should clarify - I meant historical epics, usually modern or 19th century, but dealing with the history of the culture, and usually intended for mass consumption. The myth-creating books, you might say - Buddenbrooks are one example, as is Furin Kazan in Japan.

Incidentally, I think the Nibelungs don't deal with German society - Germanic being a different thing. It'd be as ridiculous as expecting you to look exactly like your great-grandmother ;) You may have her nose, and just the same way a writer can consider their character's attitude to being forced to read the Song in school, or the fact that they have a reference point for the concept of the vengeance of a woman deceived.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

*whines*

But what about Faust? That upstart Thomas Mann and his thinly disguised family soap opera surely can't compare to JWG in terms of impact on generations of school children and theatre audience up to the present day confronting the saga of a German professor going con artist in his midlife crisis?

Favourite joke: Thomas Mann and some friends are sitting in a train. When the ticket controller shows up, TM realises he forgot to buy a ticket. One of the friends/followers says to the controller: "Can't you recognize that this is Germany's foremost writer?" Quoth the controller: "I'm sorry, Herr Goethe, I won't bother you again."

More seriously, I think cultural references are a good method to bluff your way inside a culture, and I know that for a short story, I looked up Japanese funeral habits, but I'm not sure it would work for something longer than a short story - that requires longer research, in my experience.

[winter]

I was writing the bit above with run-of-the-mill fanfiction in mind - something I've noticed in more than a few racism-related Fandom_Wank kerfuffles was the defense of "we don't write characters of color because we don't understand them". Which, with so much reference material at hand, isn't exactly an excuse that flies.

The amount of research does depend on the length of the story. I'm still uncomfortable setting deep-POV characters in worlds parallel to ours in a culture different than my own Eastern European mish-mash if it's going to be novel-length stuff. I know that's one reason I'm not much for writing in mainstream media fandoms: I know I don't get Americans and Brits.

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

But what about Faust? That upstart Thomas Mann and his thinly disguised family soap opera surely can't compare to JWG in terms of impact on generations of school children and theatre audience up to the present day confronting the saga of a German professor going con artist in his midlife crisis?

Personally, I suffered a lot more from Effi Briest. And Storm. Yikes.

[wee-warrior.livejournal.com]

I meant historical epics, usually modern or 19th century, but dealing with the history of the culture, and usually intended for mass consumption.

Ah, got you. Epic, in my mind, always goes in the direction of heroic tales and sagas - thus I was briefly wondering whether you would also recommend Beowulf as a preparation for writing a working class lad from Northern England. ;)

Incidentally, I think the Nibelungs don't deal with German society - Germanic being a different thing. It'd be as ridiculous as expecting you to look exactly like your great-grandmother ;) You may have her nose, and just the same way a writer can consider their character's attitude to being forced to read the Song in school, or the fact that they have a reference point for the concept of the vengeance of a woman deceived.

Neither my nose nor even my great-grandmother, I'm afraid, since none of my ancestors hail from the Rhine. Going by the character's attitude towards the piece is interesting, but would of course depend on whether she would have even read it at school (the German education system being just a wee bit hierarchical and even with having attended a so-called "higher school," I can assure you we never had to read it), which brings us back to sociological aspects. Or, to put it shorter, I agree with selenak in regards to the research aspect, but I also agree with your starting point - "we can't write this, because we don't know anything about it" always seems a somewhat lazy argument.

At the same time I do understand the apprehension, given that I would be afraid in the same situation to make stupid assumptions and mistakes, despite having done research. It's certainly a complex subject.

[artaxastra.livejournal.com]

And due to the wonders of the Internet, it's possible to chat with people from nearly anywhere! Which certainly gives different perspectives. I'm not sure that two Germans on my flist live in the same country, and I'm pretty certain that two Parisians don't live in the same city!

(It is interesting about the beauty pageants. Though I think they're missing the element of class in there as well. Upper class kids don't compete. This is strictly for blue collar kids looking for a way up.)

[winter]

And that's why I think the approach outlined above works - it might not result in the average person's viewpoint, or the truth, but it'll be close enough ;)

*nods* I ran into that article on Jezebel, and the (mainly American East and West Coast inteligentsia) usual commenters were rather stunned by the whole thing. Just goes to show that you don't have to cross borders or skin colour divides to get a different culture.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

I decided to friend you after reading your ibarw entry last year, so naturally I read this one, too.

This is very thoughtful--I agree that the best way to do characterization is to have the details in your mind but not necessarily to include them in your story. I also like the idea that reading the core texts of a culture can give you some of that necessary background. (Though you must have quite a lot of languages under your belt to be able to do this!)

I do agree with your commenter above that it's a good idea to use a beta-reader from the country or culture or whatever that you are representing in this character or story. You don't know that such a person will necessarily help you get it right, I realize that. You may be quite a lot more meticulous than this imaginary beta-reader. Still, it gives you a chance to allow someone who is not like you to be the authority on their own culture and to further break down barriers of geographical distance and bias.

[winter]

On the other hand, sometimes that's not a possibility. Alas, the only 15th-century Wallachian who betas my stories for me lives in my head ;)

(And language-wise, I find that between Polish, English, French and German I've so far been able to hunt down translations of most things I wanted to read.)

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Polish, English, French and German--that's quite a few languages to read!

What social dynamic do you see as problematic with relation to 15th century Wallachians? Is there a persistent anti-Wallachian sentiment in modern-day Romania?

[winter]

I'm not that sure about modern-day Romania, but Vlad Draculea's cultural background in the 15th century is a mess. To get a clear idea of him, I had to look into Romanian folklore, the Orthodox church, Islam, Byzantium, the Ottoman empire, Saxon settlers in Transylvania, Romanian boyar traditions (and how they differ from the Russian ones I'm familiar with), and Wallachian/Romanian battlehorse training. And that just gets me to where my dear voivod was 18 and became Prince of Wallachia for the first time. Sometimes, multicultural characters are a pain in the writing arm.

(For the record, apart from a tonne of biographies and movies, my research included books such as Mika Waltari's Ioannes Angelus for the Byzantium of the period and Ottoman angle, and Eugen Barbu's Principele for Romanian powerplays, if a bit later. I am dedicated in pursuit of my vampires.)

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

Wow, do I remember how the number of entries exploded on this last year! As always, I love reading your opinions on it. And I can't shake my curiosity: which children's books did you throw?

[winter]

Polish ones, alas. W Pustyni i w puszczy was the major one, I think. The white hero and heroine first teach the Ignorant Arabs about mercy, then are magnanimous enough to teach Christianity to the Ignorant Black Servant. Who is Ignonrant. Very. To which I took one look at the African friends and acquaintances I acquired in France, and facepalmed. Hard. This thing is obligatory reading in school...

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

(post-book description) Christ on a crutch.

Something I didn't think of before: travel lit also works well for learning other cultures. You have to take it with a grain of salt because of what the author's prejudices might be but on the plus side, the writers can go as in-depth with details as they want.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

Whoops, that was supposed to be a reply to your reply. :(