wash him he smely
I don’t love writing advice that goes “you should write Diverse Characters. You WILL fuck up and people will get mad at you! But you should do it anyway.” It’s not nearly as inspiring as it seems to think it is. I understand the impulse to warn people that coming from an outside perspective means you probably will miss things, and good intentions don’t always guarantee good results, but “you will fuck up and people will get mad at you! You need to do this to be a good person” is just an extremely ineffective message.
Instead, my preferred message would be, don’t treat Representation™ like a gift you’re giving to marginalized people, and don’t treat diversity like an obligation you need to hit a certain quota of. Write diverse characters because the world is diverse. If everybody in your story is straight, or cis, or white, or male, that automatically implies things about your characters, and about who they respect and who they don’t, about who feels safe around them and who doesn’t. If all your characters are white, and it’s set in a real world setting, that really implies that your characters don’t know or care about any people of color and segregate themselves from people they don’t consider the same as them, or that people of color don’t exist in your perception of the world. If all of your characters are straight, it kind of implies that nobody queer wants to hang out with them or considers them safe to come out to. If all of your characters are cis, ditto. Stuff like that. If your story is set, say, at an upper class New England boarding school in the 1920s, it makes sense that the characters might all be white boys, but women and people of color still existed in such a world and had an impact on it.
Basically, the message I would promote is, if a demographic doesn’t exist in your story, it implies something about 1) your characters and who they respect and who feels safe around them, and 2) what you as the author think the world is like, and that’s what should make you think. If your stories aren’t diverse, either you, as an author are failing to accurately and meaningfully depict the world as it is, or your characters are insulated from people different from them—which does not happen value-neutrally.
And my advice would be, meet people. Talk to people. Listen to what they say. Read memoirs. Read blogs. Make friends with people who are a different race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality than you. Engage with such people as people, not homework or Representation™ quotas. Wonder about such people’s daily life in the present and the past. Assume they are and were there, because they probably are and were. Read about what they want to see and are sick of seeing in media. (Different people will have different opinions.) And recognize that people of any demographic, demographics you share and ones you don’t, are people, are individuals who experience the world in a way unique to them, and characters you write should be too.
And then don’t write with constant fear of or resignation of fucking up, write like you’d write anything, with curiosity and humility and joy and an open mind and a willingness to reflect on what people tell you, because by writing diverse characters with people in mind, people you know and respect, you are improving your craft and making an effort to reflect something real and vital about what the world is like. Curiosity.