Writing for Marginalized Characters

I recently read a series of academic articles that explored writing for marginalized characters. These articles examined the challenges authors face when writing for these unique situations and looked at the appropriate methods or contexts in which the characters could be developed. The authors of these articles argue that their personal experiences did not provide them with an understanding of how to appropriately represent the characters' experiences. This left them with the question of how to appropriately reflect respect and accuracy in their character development.

As authors, we often have a challenge to create a life and an experience around tender characters. Our characters are often marginalized, discriminated against, or oppressed. This gives pause to the question of what we bring to this effort in our writing. Every author has their own story and experience. This insight offers an opportunity for empathy. When applied to a level of appropriateness for the writing effort, there becomes a level of respect and accuracy that automatically evolves in the writing.

I share some proposed examples to illustrate this point. If a white author were to pen a fictional story about the Southern black slavery experience, I would argue that even with some level of research the story would struggle to reflect empathy and thus would show less respect and thereby lack in accuracy but reflect more as a spun tale. In contrast, if a black author were to tell the same story, there would be a tone of empathy in their telling. This would bring out a level of innate respect and inherent accuracy. I feel this would be true of a CIS author telling a transgender story in contrast to a transgender author writing the same book. Authenticity is just difficult to fabricate.

I would argue that an exception to this might be a non-fiction book where one is writing a text or historical retelling of events. While this still may lack emotional context, a factual or technical, data-driven document, when written with respect and compassion, could offer the appropriate tact to reflect the needs of a marginalized focus topic. The other component to this sideline is that sub-characters may be portrayed with respect if well-researched when given extreme tact and respect. These characters, as they are not well-developed aspects of a story but are often used to add color to the plot of a scene, could be carefully written by people outside of the community represented by the book. Again, reflecting this point, A sub-character that is a member of the LGBTQ community in a story does not have to be written by a member of the LGBTQ community outside of the book, when done with respect, compassion, and research.

This leaves me with three major points: respect, compassion, and relevance. While we all have our own experiences, these offer us empathy but not necessarily a sympathetic view of what we may be creating for our characters. To this end, we must ensure we maintain respect and compassion in our writing. We must remember we need to have a sense of relevance to the character we are creating. To offer authenticity to their story we need to have true personal relevance. We may have known a person or seen an event, while we may have done the research or seen the news, without true relevance, our voice will never ring true. This will be apparent to the reader and will reflect in the tone of our character. Respect, compassion, and relevance.