How Much Lived Experience Do You Need to Create Diverse Characters?
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“There’s a quote from Julius Caesar at the start of Area 7. I made it up. It says fiction on the back. A lot of the books – I stopped it in Scarecrow for the sake of pace – have the prologue at the start. Advantage Press doesn’t exist. W.M. Lawry & Co. He was a cricket guy. There are gags in there if you look closely enough. But it says fiction on the back.”
Matthew Reilly in Literati: Australian Contemporary Literary Figures Discuss Fear, Frustrations and Fame by James Phelan
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Truth in fiction seems to be a big debate topic these days, at least some truths. Nobody seems to mind when Matthew Reilly makes things up in his books or when George Lucas writes about an epic resistance and the religion at the heart of it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But when a writer wants to explore a real race or a real culture or a real disability that they have no lived experience of in a piece of fiction, it seems to be more and more of a problem. Verisimilitude, or the ring of truth, apparently isn’t good enough anymore. Some writers of those races or cultures or with those disabilities don’t want you to read a piece of fiction informed by imagination and (hopefully) a decent chunk of research. They instead want you to read their piece of writing about the same topic (whether fictional or not) so that you can read “the truth” or at least a piece of writing informed by their truth.
I’ve heard the expression “lived experience” plenty but the first time I saw it in relation to fiction was in a review of the book Wonder by RJ Palacio. It’s the story of a boy with facial deformities who joins a mainstream school for the first time in the fifth grade after being home-schooled previously and the challenges he faces, particularly bullying. The review didn’t dwell on Palacio’s lack of lived experience in relation to facial deformities; in fact, it almost seemed more like it was just something being mentioned in passing. But it gave me pause.
Why? Because the writer is also an adult female but there was no mention of her lack of lived experience as a male child. Why then, in a piece of fiction, which is by definition entirely made up, was the writer’s lack of shared characteristics with one of her characters worth mentioning?
I’ve written books with characters who are kidnapped, who get shot, who lose their memories and who are home-schooled, none of which has ever happened to me. They have a variety of jobs that I have never worked in including weapons designer, FBI agent, CIA agent, marine, farmer, doctor. They have a variety of medical conditions including depression, agoraphobia, amnesia and post-traumatic stress disorder, none of which I suffer from. I’ve done a load of research to try to get as many of the details right as possible. Sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve failed. Some people have liked my books. Some people haven’t. But nobody has ever commented on my lack of lived experience with these things.
It seems to be different when we’re talking about lived experience of race and culture and disability, the things we are rather than the things we do. I don’t know why and possibly that’s attributable to the fact that I’m a white, able-bodied, fifth-generation (at least) Australian. My only minority status is as a woman and even I admit that being a woman in Australia is a pretty great thing. So I understand the advantages that I’ve had.
Still, could you imagine telling a man that he couldn’t write a female character? Could you imagine telling an adult they couldn’t write a child character? Could you imagine telling a human they couldn’t write an alien from outer space? Now envisage telling a disabled writer that you found their imagining of an able-bodied character offensive. It’s unthinkable. So why is the vice versa situation any different?
I think that what writers with lived experience of particular races or cultures or disabilities really find offensive is bad writing about their races and cultures and disabilities. We can all get on board with this because every writer finds bad writing offensive. But personal attachments to these things that are being poorly depicted understandably make their offence even more intense.
The problem with any type of lived experience and making any part of fiction writing contingent upon it, of course, is that it really limits the things that a writer, that any writer, can write about. And in the end it amounts to censorship.
So what should writers do? Here’s a little checklist:
*Whatever you want – it’s your right as a writer.
But if you want your writing to be respected and your mental health to survive, here’s a slightly longer additional checklist:
*Make sure the race or culture or disability you’re writing about is essential to your characterisation and your story – if it’s interchangeable, then you really need to ask yourself why you’ve chosen that race or that culture or that disability.
*Research, research, research – it’s the only way to get the facts right. And while truth will be debated until the end of time, facts are unarguable.
*Prepare for the fact that no matter how much research, how much consideration, how much sensitivity you use in your approach, there will always be some readers that just don’t like what they consider “appropriation” – it’s their right as a reader.
