Write Diversity

Welcome Page (READ ME)

Welcome to Write Diversity. A collaboration of Wattpad users hoping to encourage more diversity in our writing. Before we get into the thick of it lets get some things out the way.

The following information was provided by Claudia from Writing With Color, my personal opinions and sesnativity reresearch provided by K. Hall.

Write Diversity: How to write yourself out the equation

Truth is even other people of color are sometimes afraid to write about or outside their own cultures. When I started writing I found myself debating do I want market or do I want to write what I know? Something I learned is a big issue among most writers.

It's incredibly easy to write people out of their own stories, even to write yourself out of your own story but what does that mean exactly?

It refers to a story that should conceivably have a diverse population of characters, but tends to only feature white characters. This can happen consciously or unconsciously, but it happens. Let's talk about it.

Firstly, Unconscious Erasure

Sometimes we can unintentionally exclude others out of their own stories. There are many reasons that this can happen: fear of failure, fear of criticism, and consumption of mass media. We've all be trained, whether we're a person of color or not that white is the default so we do exclude diverse casts because it takes a conscious effort to fight against our fears and eurocentric forms of entertainment.

We are all so used to seeing things from a eurocentric viewpoint that we exclude ourselves from being the hero. It's the self fulfilling prophecy; we don't see ourselves so we don't know how to present ourselves in our own story. We relegate our characters to the background because we've often been made to believe that is where they belong. And I would say the majority of the time we aren't even aware that we've done this.

Second, Fear of Failure

Many people cite fear of failing as a reason for not including diverse characters. Why is this an unconscious erasure? Because many people may not realize this is what is holding them back and they might not know how to move forward because of it. The fear of failure is something that runs rampant in writing culture. Sometimes it's simply known as writers block. As writers, it seems like we live our writing lives in a constant state of fear.

When it comes to diversity, having one more thing to potentially fail at can just be too much to handle for writers. If we believe that we aren't going to do well, we often don't write things that we feel uncomfortable with because we want to stay in our comfort zone. This is something that happens with most writers, white and non-white alike. It's especially unfortunate as a writer of color to be so afraid of...

Third Fear of Criticism

This also comes from the same place. Fear of criticism differs from failure because we assume that because we succeed that we will be free from criticism. People may criticise a story for anything and adding in diversity is just one more thing to criticize. The characters may not be "Insert Culture/Ethnicity/Sexual Orientation, etc" enough or they might be too ethnic. Some readers may wonder why there are diverse characters at all and some will wonder why there is not enough. There is no avoiding criticism, but writing yourself out of your own story (or someone out of their own story) closes one door of criticism that people can't call you out on and it's a shame.

Consumption of Mass Media

Everyone has been subjected to the same eurocentric media that runs across all forms of media. Books, TV, video games, music, and other forms of media are filled to the brim with a eurocentric viewpoint above other cultures and populations.