Tips for Developing Diverse Characters
The world we live in is changing fast, showing the urge to create spaces more relatable and stories more multiple. But knowing how to develop diverse characters can be a challenge, as sometimes we want to write about experiences we never lived or know little about.
Diversity should not be a box to mark on the goals, as just the presence of a diverse character does not solve the problem. These personas need to have a strong storyline, reflecting the complexity of the real world, adding to the creation of a stronger novel. It's necessary to learn how to develop diverse characters to build stories that will connect more deeply with readers, but at the same time, be a good work of fiction.
But where to start? Here are some steps that can help with this journey.
Listen
Listening is one of the main characteristics we need to write any story, as inspiration can come from places we could never imagine. But this gains another level of importance in the development of diverse characters.
To learn about other people's experiences, we need to listen and see how their life is, the struggles they pass, making it possible to understand their actions and personality. This listening can be made with people you know, with movies, series or other books. The main goal is to understand the group we want to portrait, making the best to represent them.
In an interview available at Louisiana Chanel, Sally Rooney, author of the best seller Normal People, says that she wanted to show how class interferes at all levels of our lives, even our romantic relationships. We can see a similar dynamic developing diverse characters, as some characteristics such as being black, fat, or disable will affect almost all aspects of the life of those people. Listening is necessary to see how they react to those effects in their lives, making it possible to create more realistic dynamics.
Include your experiences
Write about what you know is the precept that never gets old. It is easier to start writing about our experiences or situations that happened to us, expanding these events, and including them in new circumstances. Think about experiences that can incorporate into the development of the characters, something about your life or the life of someone you know, something you saw, facts that happened in your childhood. Diverse characters are not like this just because of their body type or skin color. Their background and story need to feel authentic and real ongoings will help to achieve this connection.
The mysterious Italian author Elena Ferrante, in one of her rare interviews, talks about how she saw the violence in Naples and used this in her novels, inserting them Lila and Lenu in this environment. Her protagonists did not exist, but Elena used her experiences living in Naples to create them and mainly create the context they are inserted into. That helps to bring to life a mature plot with extensive characters. In Elena’s words: “The emotional bond we establish with characters is generally what makes their story seem like an endless series of misfortunes. In life, as in novels, we are aware of the pain of others, we feel their suffering, only when we learn to love them."
Her experiences in real life Naples made it easier to know how women were treated there, for example, and this incorporated into her novel creates a context that feels real, making the connection with the reader. Think about how the context you live in can help to build the characters, how the group you want to portrait is treated in that context. Those questions can give us some paths in the development of them.
Get beta readers
If you want to incorporate a character that is part of a group that is in a reality very distant from yours, getting beta readers is very important to understand if you are going in the right way. Those readers should be from the group portrayed, and they will see if the representation is good and close to reality.
That is very important as we want to know how to develop diverse characters to build good novels and not create insipid stereotyped personas. Beta readers will help to see if something is out of place and needs to be changed, if the creation of the character is stereotyped, or if you need to do more research.
Is not easy to show our work to anyone, so look first for people that you trust or find groups of writers that will treat your work with kindness.
Remember that your goal is to tell a story
During the process to develop diverse characters, we need to remember that our leading goal is to tell a story, but not necessarily teach the readers or be a manual for that subject. It is evident that fiction novels are a way to see different worlds and maybe understand realities we never dreamed of, but all do this because they are telling good stories.
It is important to reflect parts of the world we live in our novels, as we build a micro-society where readers want to themselves. However, this should not be limiting, this diversity is an element to make a story even better, but this does not need to be the central point if you do not want to.
Talking about her book The Vanishing Half, Britt Bennet says that she is happy to see the novel in anti-racist lists, but she is not teaching anti-racism in the story. Race is an element for her characters as race is an element for people in the real world, and this is something we need to have in mind.
Learning how to develop diverse characters is important and should be practiced, but this is only one element to make a good novel.
