Dealing with Difference

I was recently consulted by a writer who worried about working with a protagonist of a different race.

This relates slightly to last week’s blog, which discussed our propensity for applying rules to what writers “ought” or “ought not” to be writing about. If that had been his concern, my answer would have been much shorter. I don’t believe in rules. Explore what you feel moved to explore.

But his question had more to do with whether he could succeed; whether his character would be credible. Perhaps we tend to be overly self-conscious about protagonists of a different race, or class or even gender. We tend to focus anxiously on the differences and forget the similarities. (After all, men are human too.)

We all have the same human concerns. We would all like to be safe, warm and well-fed. And I also believe we would all like to be loved. We may respond to things differently sometimes, but this may depend as much on individual as on group differences.

It is a valid concern though: Are we able to enter into the life experiences of someone different from ourselves? There’s no doubt that it is easier to write about characters of the same gender, from the same milieu, and with a similar world view to our own. We give our character certain individual traits, and we know instinctively how they’ll react to any given circumstance.

We’re a little more wary when a character is different. We have to get their voice right. For instance, we’re unlikely to find two men having this conversation over an after-work drink:

“She said she’d phone, but it’s been three days. Do you think that’s normal?”

“Oh totally. Mandy didn’t phone me for two weeks after our first date.”

“She’s probably still wary after that disastrous marriage.”

“Totally. I’m sure she’s being cautious. It hasn’t been that long since the divorce.”

“Too soon? You don’t think she’s commitment-phobic, do you?” 

It’s a mysterious process, creating characters. The more you can know about them, the better you will intuit their behaviour and responses. The more you observe, the better you’ll absorb their speech patterns and voice.

I don’t consider my characters from the outside. I try to climb inside them, see things as they would, and feel things as they might. You need to know how they developed in order to understand what they became.

It was the hardest thing I’ve done, in my latest book, to become a man – not just a man, but one who studied to be a priest. I hope he turned out sympathetic and dryly humorous, but he’s austere and tortured … very unlike me. (Although, if I’d met him when I was a student, I would have fallen in love with him. I always had a weakness for austere and tortured.)

I spent hours talking to people who’d gone through the type of experiences he did. People are often really generous in sharing even pretty painful experiences. I spent further hours with an academic who is also a priest. He was very clever at talking me through the process of my character’s spirituality. He gave me a pile of books: since my character was so cerebral, I needed to read what he would have, in order to see how his views had developed, and to think like him.

Quite by chance I met a former monk, who allowed me to nose around his life and his house. When he finally read a draft of my novel, he found it quite traumatic and upsetting. Even though I had developed my character before meeting him, and had merely used him for refining details, he found it all a bit too close for comfort.

I was really pleased. I mean, of course I was sorry that he was upset. But it did mean I’d managed to capture something that resonated with him.

So my advice would be this: choose to explore anything that moves you. But do it properly, and not in isolation. If your character is different from you, look at him or her both as an individual and as the member of a group. Then learn as much as you can. Read, observe, talk to people, hang out and absorb.

When you’ve done enough, you’ll know. You’ll be able to crawl inside them and know instinctively how they’ll react in any given circumstance.
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