The Consequences of Writing The Other
“The Other” is a term given to those not like yourself. This is most often applied to black characters written by white authors. On its face, this doesn’t seem difficult. Simply write the character with little concern for the color of their skin, and add it in later. But nothing happens in isolation. Not only is there a culture within your story, but there’s one that’s going to read your story, and it is in that that the complication lies.
Take for example The Tombs of Atuan, the second book in the Earthsea series. It focuses around the character Tenar, a girl who was taken from her family at a young age and raised in The Place, a temple where they worship the Old Gods. While she is considered a religious figure in the temple, she has little in the way of rights. This was written intentionally by a female writer, but the problem comes in the means of her escape. She escapes that way of life with Ged, the main character of A Wizard of Earthsea, the previous book. As Ursula K. Le Guin herself pointed out, from one perspective, this has the message that the woman needed a man’s help to escape. The way Le Guin looked at it, they needed each other’s help, because Ged was also trapped within the tombs.
This is the tricky part of writing the other, or any character who would be marginalized in the society reading the book. No matter how you write them, you’re sending a message of some kind. If it’s that women are helpless without men around, that’s bad. On the other hand, this may be a point of growth for the character when she realizes she doesn’t need them and solves the problem on her own. This is much the case in the later books in Earthsea.
It’s a particular problem when a particular sex, race, religion, etc. is represented by a single character. That character then bears the burden of representing an entire set of people. For example, gay characters are often written as stereotypes, gay men in particular. We’ve all seen it: the lone effeminate male character who loves clothes and singing. Not only is this offensive to gay men, but to effeminate straight men who like clothes and singing and are tired of being called gay.
The best way to avoid this is to do research. There are plenty of people willing to help if you ask. People are helpful when you tell them you’re writing a character like them and you want to get it right, because chances are, they’re tired of seeing it done wrong and have a lot of opinions. I myself have a lot of opinions on writing dads, single dads in particular, programmers, smart characters in general, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and ADHD. It may be hard for some of us, but this is for your writing. It’s worth the effort.
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