#SupportWNDB – The Series: DIVERSITY IN FICTION
DIVERSITY IN FICTION��
by Rose Montague
Some of you may know I have a handicapped son.����He was born three months premature and has cerebral palsy.����He uses a walker and a wheelchair to get around.����Most people generally react to him in three ways.����There are those that stare at him and give the impression that they think he is a freak.����There are those that tend to ignore him completely, pretending he doesn’t exist. Then there are those that treat him like a normal person, with feelings like all of us.����He may have a different set of struggles and worries than some of us but I think for the most part he is a lot like most of us, doing his best with what life has dealt him.
I think fiction writers generally write in similar categories.����In some of the fictional stories I see there is no diversity, no handicapped people, nobody with a different sexual orientation, and no people of color.����It is almost as if the writer has decided they just don’t want to deal with these things in their book so they just build a world without diversity. It is their way of ignoring what is in the real world and transferring that to their imaginary world. Unfortunately, I believe most of our writers today fall into this category.
Then there are those that go to great pains in highlighting those that are different, sometimes to the point that it escapes the boundaries of the story itself and becomes just an attention grabber.����Life is not a circus to highlight these differences. Being different does not make somebody a freak and believe me, they don’t want to be treated like they are part of a freak show. They don’t want to be treated that way in a book either.
Some writers treat these differences as normal, just like our world of diversity is normal.����In life we are going to interact with people that are not like us.����That is just something that is to be expected.
These writers don’t pretend there are no differences and they don’t make a big deal about it when they write about people that are different.����I would like to think that both as a person and as a writer, I fall into this category.
One thing I have also discovered as I have met and talked to both readers and writers alike is that people want to relate to the characters you write about. Some readers look for books that have characters like them.����Nobody wants to feel alone in their differences but they don’t want to be treated like freaks either. This is why I support diversity in fiction.
In��JADE,��two of my main characters have a lesbian relationship.����I tried to treat this as a normal, loving, and developing relationship that will continue to grow in my second book which should release in the next few months.����I hope you will support diversity both in the way you write as well as the choices you make in what you read.
Please consider assisting our efforts to diversify everyone’s bookshelf by donating to��We Need Diverse Books’ fundraising campaign
#SupportWNDB
Rose has always been a big reader and her dream of becoming a published author became a reality when Jade was published in November, 2013. ��Book Two (Jane) is expected to be published early 2015. ��She has worked both in a library as well as several bookstores. Rose lives in Elon, NC and is currently working on the final book in the trilogy which will be called Jill and the first book of a new series called Norma Jean’s School of Witchery.
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