Lately, I’ve been thinking about Mitch Albom’s panicked column last year. For those that don’t remember, the controversy about American Dirt was in its heyday, and Albom wrote about his frustration that writers aren’t allowed to write outside their own identity. He worried that writers would only be allowed to rep their own race and sex, and lamented at the amount of famous work that would never have been published. Albom got everything in his column completely wrong, of course, but the question that led to it has remained, and still hangs over writers from every genre: Who has the right to tell a story?
Against that heated backdrop, I should probably be a little worried that my next thriller, They’re Gone (written under my pseudonym E.A. Barres), is told from the perspectives of two protagonists, both women of mixed race. And I’m a dude and a quick peek at the hashtag #menwritingwomen shows that writing from a female perspective isn’t necessarily a, um, “strength” of male writers.
My approach to choosing my protagonists wasn’t necessarily conscious. It was something the story called for, and I followed that call, both in regards to their sex and race. The choice seemed instinctual, perhaps because, as someone of mixed-race, I never felt entirely accepted by one culture. Growing up, I was always the only mixed-race kid in my neighborhood or school. It was lonely, and I learned quickly to latch on to other cultures.
That said, I’m keenly aware that “latching on” is often a nice way of saying “appropriation.” I’m a careful writer, and I like to think I earned my characters…but I wondered if my feelings were common among other writers. So I asked three writers—S.A. Cosby, Radha Vatsal, and Steph Cha—about their experiences, and their thoughts about representation.
THE RESEARCH
I’m pretty fortunate that my agent and editors, in addition to being wonderful and supportive and patient (trust me on that one) are also women who are ABSOLUTELY not afraid to call me out on my bullshit. If I ever write a sentence that includes the word “boobily” then, Reader, there’s no way that sentence is making its way to the published page.
And my characters generally fall into my own experiences. Half of my family is Panamanian, the other half is from Nevada (Nevadanian?) and white. One of my protagonists follows that same background. The other was adopted from Vietnam and raised by a white family; a personal history shared with my wife. My research consisted of talking with members of my family, and seeing how other writers have represented these types of characters.
S.A. Cosby, author of one of this summer’s hottest thrillers, Blacktop Wasteland, has a similar approach. “For me, its equal parts academic research and personal experience. I’ll talk to individuals whose experience I’m trying to represent to make sure I’m doing it as well as I can. But I’ll also read articles and books that delve into the experiences I’m trying to represent as well.”
Radha Vatsal, in addition to her wonderful, insightful nonfiction, writes moving historical fiction, so research is something she’s intimately familiar with. “I do my research on people the same way I research any other aspects of the period,” she says, “by going back to period sources. If I need to write from the perspective of someone of a different race or gender, I try to make sure that the story demands it.”
Steph Cha’s celebrated novel, Your House Will Pay, had perspectives from both African-American and Korean-American characters. “I did a lot of background research on black vernacular and where my characters lived, what their story might have been, and then getting specific on what that might have looked like. I also read papers on black vernacular. I took a studied approach. I wanted to respect the rules of that dialect, but I didn’t play with phonetics. I also have Koreans in my book, and some of them speak in accents. I wanted to be authentic, and nothing like a caricature.”
I asked Cha if she worried about representation in equal regard to her Korean-American and African-American characters.
“Not as much. Grace’s family isn’t a lot like my family, but I know a lot of Korean families similar to hers. And that’s just more familiar to me. I didn’t worry that people would hold me accountable for discrepancies or insensitivities with the Korean family. I had more leeway there, and felt freer and more expert. But with Shawn’s family, I wanted to get this right. I wanted to make them real.”
THE THING ABOUT ARTISTIC LIBERTY
The worry that Albom articulated really boils down to permissiveness. Writing is, in many ways, an act of defiance. That’s not to elevate it beyond other jobs or careers, but the concept of writing a book is dwarfing—which is probably why it’s a bucket list item for so many people, like running a marathon, visiting every continent, or eating Popeye’s new chicken sandwich (check!).
Defiance, of course, often results in disregard. There’s a sense that you’re going against the grain, and to do it thoroughly, you have to be resolute. At least, that was the sense when I was studying writing in the late 1990s, and being fed a steady diet of canonical authors, and told that there should be no boundaries to creativity. I liked my schooling, still enjoy the work of many those literary lions, and agree on the importance of imagination.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to get it right. Or be held accountable when you don’t.
“My 11th grade English teacher once told me,” says Cosby, “‘You can write about anything if your story earns it’ and to me earning it means doing your research. Avoiding caricatures and creating characters. If a writer does those things, I feel you can write about anything. Does that mean some things are clichés and maybe won’t resonate the way you think?
“Well, yes. And that’s the risk you take.”
“If you are going to write about an experience that doesn’t belong to you,” says Cha, “then you have to do it well. And there are ways you can do that, like hiring readers who belong to that group. But if you don’t have any friends who belong to that group, then you have to ask yourself, ‘Why am I writing about this?’
“I read a lot of books that cross identity lines, and when it’s done well, I don’t really hear anything about it.”
“I’d like to recommend an essay,” Vatsal offers, “by Alexander Chee called ‘How to Unlearn Everything: When it comes to writing the ‘other’ what questions are we not asking?’ Chee makes several points that hit home. One of them is his observation that “For the 24 years [he’s] been teaching creative writing, the stories [he sees] have predominantly been about white people, or characters that mysteriously don’t have any declared ethnicity or race at all.” And this is regardless of the ethnicity of his students.
“As a writer of historical novels with a white protagonist, this got me thinking about what we think stories should look like, and what stories we think we should tell.”
AND THE THING ABOUT ARTISTIC RESPONSIBILITY
But, really, what responsibility do we have, as writers? Every published writer has written something that, likely, provoked a different reaction than they expected. You can only control so much.
So what are you responsible for?
“There was a backlash from white writers,” says Cha, “after the American Dirt controversy who were afraid they were going to get cancelled, but I think that fear is actually very healthy. I had that fear the whole time I was writing Your House Will Pay. The fear that I would get it wrong, the fear that I’d be afraid to share this book with black readers. I think that fear of messing up is very valuable for writers, and we all have fears about other things. I’m afraid of writing poor sentences. That scares me, so I re-read my book relentlessly. There’s nothing political about that; it’s simply not harmful. But if I put something in that’s racist or offensive, that has to be realized.”
Cosby has, in his style, a simple and elegant response: “I think my responsibility as a writer is to tell the truth, to tell the best story I can. But not at the expense of anyone else’s truth.”
“I think we always need to ask ourselves,” says Vatsal, “why are we representing certain people in certain ways? Are we relying on stereotypes—and this question isn’t just limited to writing about characters of a different ethnicity. It’s quite possible, say, for a South Asian writers to stereotype South Asian characters as well.”
But what about crossing boundaries? Are there limits to what a writer should attempt to capture?
“I don’t think so,” Cosby replies, “but all writers have their own boundaries. For instance, I would never say you can’t write about an Indigenous character if you aren’t Indigenous, but after reading a book like the great Winter Counts, I would definitely recommend that you be sure you have something new to add to the milieu.”
Radha agrees. “A good writer attempts to portray their characters as individuals and not as representatives of some broader category.”
#TRUTH
Critics often use a phrase like “universal truth” or “human condition” to describe the greatness of a certain novel. Relevant to this discussion is the concept that all humans share a universal truth, and great artwork identifies it.
But with such diversity among people and greatly varied experiences, do those ideals truly exist?
“I think a novel like Great Expectations details many universal truths we can all relate to,” says Cosby. “Hope, lost love, ambition…but it’s not the only book that does this. The same could be said of Native Son.
“The difference and the thing marginalized writers have always had to fight is that we are expected to acknowledge the importance of a novel like Great Expectations, but other people are not expected to acknowledge the greatness of other novels that express those same truths from a different perspective.”
“Yes and no,” says Cha. “I think that there are things that are universal and unite people. But ‘universal’ is assumed when it comes to books that we grew up with and were taught, which are largely books about middle class white people. As a critic, I have to try and find a way to entice people to read a book, but not necessarily by telling them it’s something they’ll identify with.”
THE GOAL
Truthfully, I want to disappear as a writer.
Don’t get me wrong. The money and awards and parades (MAYBE!) would be wonderful. It’d be nice to make a living off this, to give returns to the people who have long supported me.
I mean “disappear” in a different way.
I used to read books without a clue who the author was, and then I’d turn to the back and look at their photo in surprise—they never resembled what I imagined (they still don’t, but that’s because author photos are beautiful lies). I want to give readers that feeling, to give them a sense of identity and connection, regardless of who they are. I think there’s something lovely and fundamental about that, the sense of connection that flits past boundary.
But it’s not possible without an understanding of what those boundaries are, why they were raised, and what the world looks like from either side. If we don’t achieve that, as writers, or even attempt to achieve that, then we’re cheating.
We’re cheating readers.
We’re cheating our characters.
We’re cheating a goal that’s powerful and simple and true, a connection both internal and external, that moment when the lonely, isolating act of reading becomes a shared experience.
