So on Yorkist's thread, someone mentioned that if you are in any doubt about how to use something, you should leave well alone.
This raised a question for me, and I don't want to derail that thread, so I'm going to be brave and ask it here.
I come from a very white, very middle class background. I went to a very white university, and whilst I have friends from many different nationalities, they are all predominantly white.
I want the book I am writing to portray a more accurate representation of the world than the small bit of it I inhabit. In the rewriting I've been doing since finding AW, I've made the MC black and one of the main supporting characters Asian. Mainly because their race is entirely incidental to the story, so why shouldn't they be.
But this raises some issues for me - I obviously don't want to do anything offensive, but I have literally no frame of reference for knowing what could inadvertantly be considered offensive. Clearly there's some stuff which is obvious, and I'm not an idiot, so that's fine. But what about all the stuff I either think I know about but don't, or haven't even come across?
This leads me to think along the lines of the first sentence of this post - you have doubts, so leave well alone. Which brings me back to an unrealistically white story.
How do you deal with this? I wonder if it is a contributory factor towards te lack of diversity in SFF books? Am I over thinking it?!
This raised a question for me, and I don't want to derail that thread, so I'm going to be brave and ask it here.
I come from a very white, very middle class background. I went to a very white university, and whilst I have friends from many different nationalities, they are all predominantly white.
I want the book I am writing to portray a more accurate representation of the world than the small bit of it I inhabit. In the rewriting I've been doing since finding AW, I've made the MC black and one of the main supporting characters Asian. Mainly because their race is entirely incidental to the story, so why shouldn't they be.
But this raises some issues for me - I obviously don't want to do anything offensive, but I have literally no frame of reference for knowing what could inadvertantly be considered offensive. Clearly there's some stuff which is obvious, and I'm not an idiot, so that's fine. But what about all the stuff I either think I know about but don't, or haven't even come across?
This leads me to think along the lines of the first sentence of this post - you have doubts, so leave well alone. Which brings me back to an unrealistically white story.
How do you deal with this? I wonder if it is a contributory factor towards te lack of diversity in SFF books? Am I over thinking it?!