Writing Blog

20220330 On Characterisation

March 30, 2022, 8:30am

Kåre Enga in Montana asked, “How does one include diverse characters without making them a cliche or stereotype?”

Great question! And this answer comes from my own writing experiences, especially working with editors and beta readers, as well as some of the things I learned at university recently.

This is something that movies so often get wrong. We are confronted with characters that we can simplify down to “the smart one”, “the crazy one”, “the promiscuous one”, etc., and then this gets further taken to “the villain”, “the bimbo”, “the scientist”, etc. and then, even “the gay character”, “the African-American character”, “the autistic character”, etc. There is something about each and every one of those that I will come to at the end of this… and that is definition.

Anyway, what I am saying is that through Hollywood’s lens, we reduce characters to a very superficial level. And that informs a lot of writers and a lot of writing. I won’t name the books, but a large number of best-sellers released this century do just that.

So, the best way to represent these characters is for this part of the character to NOT be their defining trait. Okay, let’s look at DC. They do a lot wrong, but in the character of Cyborg they have a young man who lost everything through a car accident, and his father used alien technology to rebuild his body and save his life. Oh, yeah, and he happens to be an African-American. His skin colour is not his defining trait – that would be fitting into the world as part-human, part-machine and his angst over feeling like he is not human. Being Black does fit into that, as it makes his anxiety worse where he is already being judged because of his skin colour, especially by the authorities, but it is not his defining characteristic.

So, any character has defining characteristics, and while their sexuality, religiosity, race, size, etc. might inform some of their decisions or how they respond to authorities or medical personnel, it is not their defining characteristic.

Instead of saying I have a black woman who is a doctor, say I have a doctor under a huge amount of pressure at work. This doctor happens to be female. She is struggling in a world that is still patriarchal in many ways… oh, yeah, she also happens to be an African-American, and so that also affects the way she is viewed by some of her colleagues. Her defining characteristic? She is a person whose job as a doctor creates pressure at work that bleeds into the rest of her life. Additional pressure comes from being female in a male-dominated world. More additional pressure comes from being Black in the same situation.

So, what I am suggesting – and this is just the way I see it – is to write the characters as people first, then add these externals to the character. They will inform a character’s decision-making process and the way they see the world, but if they are an individual person, then the stereotypes should not come into it.

The following is a video about dealing with the neurodiverse in fiction.

It’s long, sorry, but fascinating. However, what I suggest is watch Dakota Fanning’s comments about portraying a person with autism (30:00 in). Note – person with autism, not autistic person. The difference is subtle, and comes back to my opening, but one says they are a person who has neurodiversity, the other says they are a person defined by being neurodiverse. It’s like a person who is African-American is a person first; an Afro-American person is African-American first.

I don’t think I really answered the question well, but what it comes down to, for me, is that our characters are individuals and people first and foremost. The rest is a part of who they are, but not only who they are.

And, if in doubt, find a beta reader who can more readily relate. I use almost exclusively female beta readers to ensure my characters who are female come across as real people. In a long story I recently submitted, the main characters are a man who is gay and a man who is an Indigenous Australian… so I had a person from each of those communities read the work before submitting. (The character who is gay needed tweaking, while the other needed an entire scene replaced and other things changed.)

Sorry I can’t be more help, but this is an issue writers are facing today, and it is good – we need to question what we are doing to make sure we are doing it as well as we can for as many people as we can.

Thanks, Kåre Enga in Montana !