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

[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.