It's scary but it's also a lot of fun and a chance to talk with people about cultural differences with a level of frankness that honestly isn't present in normal interaction. Some of the people I'm tightest with in my writing group are the people who check my work on my female and minority characters. You can build a lot of trust in a group like that because everyone has to trust everyone else at that level, and you have to have those sorts of uncomfortable conversations on a week to week basis (and they become less uncomfortable when you get used to having them all the time with people who you know are still going to be your friends afterwards)
That does sound kind of nice, actually. I'm not a part of any writing groups, but i'll probably try and find one once i'm a little further into my story.
That's a good plan. If you can find a good one, they are an awesome support (because they're all the same kind of crazy you are)
Absolutely agree with @Commandante Lemming! If you want to know how many eggs are in a bird's nest, go climb the tree and find out, don't ask someone else on the ground next to you. I have been in over twenty different countries on three continents, and at least read several different languages. I like to socialize with people as best I can in their culture. I have friends who are Indian Hindu, Pakistani Muslim, Japanese, Chinese, Russian... and if you think we are all the same except for skin color, you obviously haven't and don't. That is partially true for those people who have come to live here in the US; for one thing, that is our cultural mantra, and the newcomer is trying to blend in, perhaps is even here because of that mantra. But go to his homeland, and you will see how culture shapes individuals, how they think, how they feel, their own stereotypes. Chinese language, for example, with its plethora of monosyllabic homonyms probably has a big hand in shaping the Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang, because a word has meaning only in context and context shapes the word... kind of like English, "run" can be a noun, verb or adjective, or something entirely different, it all depends on context. Indo-European languages with their hard and fast grammar and precise word meanings (though flexible word order) has shaped our if-then-else, context free logic system. Which is better? Well, it depends on whether you are Chinese or of European descent. I had a close discussion with a Muslim friend, who is Sunni (Hanafist school) and I brought up the subject of Shiism. I was surprised at the strong visceral reaction from this very intelligent person, and he almost spat out "Shiites! Ugh, they aren't really Muslims, you know." A few years back I did some open source intelligence work for the army, which involved reading a lot of foreign websites and newspapers. One of these was the website of Sipah e-Sahaaba (Followers of the Friends of the Prophet) in Pakistan, a particularly nasty group that enjoys bombing Shiite mosques during Friday services, or shooting up a Shiite procession celebrating the death of Hussein, one of their founding saints, usually killing a hundred or so men, women and children. As I read their website, I realized I knew these people, I had grown up with them sixty years ago in North Carolina. They are the Ku Klux Klan, same mentality, different others. So get an Indian of the same sub-culture that you want to write about, and let him tell you about his culture.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with @Commandante Lemming, assuming I'm not misinterpreting a little here,cultural elements really don't have to be included. If your doing a character who is reasonably modern and Western, there's no need to include many details about Indian culture, if any. If everytime an Indian character shows up, it has to be painfully obvious they are so, it kind of ruins the point of equality, doesn't it? Not ever Black character is immersed in Africa-American culture. Heck, there's not even one African-American culture and it not as segregated from the rest as it used to. For some characters, we have to allow it to barely matter.
I think I'm going to have to disagree here. Everyone, of every background, is at some level a product of the place and culture in which they were raised - and in many ways our individual traits are determined by our choices of which of those aspects to assimilate and which of those aspects to break from. That's not to say that ethnic culture is the prime input into anyone's character, nor is it to say that everyone conforms to either the external stereotypes or internal expectations of that culture. BUT at some level everyone is affected by it, and there are different family and cultural consequences for different behaviors, and the effects of that rub off into a character's attitudes. I'll give an example from my office. I work at a research institution in Washington, DC (in logistics, not research), and the vast majority of our professional staff are White Americans with high levels of education who are all politically conservative. You'd think it's a homogenous fishbowl, but it's not, and I feel some quite pronounced cultural differences from some of my co-workers. For one, I come from a family where my dad was the first to go to college, and my relatives are mostly blue-collar - that's not the case for a lot of my co-workers. Their families pressured them to read the great books and pursue intellectualism - my family occasionally pressured me to think of manual labor as a more honest form of work and that intellectuals were a drain on society. Conversely, my family raised me to have a lot of respect for the intelligence of the working class, and so I tend to be a lot more consciously anti-elitist than a lot of the people I know. I also happen to be a product of the American West (Colorado), which has some pretty pronounced cultural differences from both the American South and the American Northeast (both of which are far better represented at my office than the Mountain West). And trust me, I feel all of those cultural differences quite strongly on a day-to-day basis - even though they're not the biggest thing in my life and not something anyone on the street would normally notice. When I'm dealing with my Indian-American character, I have to deal with the same type of subtle differences. It's not like Vinya has to be chomping on a somosa every time she shows up (that would be lazy and racist in addition to being unnecessary), but I know that I'm kidding myself if I don't consider the fact that her cultural inputs influence the way she perceives herself and the impacts of the decisions she makes. The core of her character isn't her culture - it's that she has a genius level IQ and is obsessed with music, fashion, and pop culture (she's a professional fashion blogger for a cable TV channel). BUT how she operationalizes her self perception and her personality goes through at least four different cultural filters: 1) Her family is of Indian and specifically Assamese cultural origin 2) She's a Jain 3) She grew up very well off with a lot of expectations and has never wanted for money 4) She's a born and raised creature of Southern California. Vinya self-presents as extremely...scratch that...hella worldly and deeply American in her mannerisms - but that still has to filter through the ideas she was raised and socialized with (by both her parents and society around her). In her specific case, you can even say that she purposefully overplays her level of assimilation into American culture as a reaction to both her parents' perception of her life choices and as a way of fitting in with a surrounding culture that labels her as "ethnic" and therefore not one of them. That's a very different set of filters from her best friend/co-worker Nina - who is Greek-American, from North Wisconsin, grew up working in the family diner, and is more blue-collar in her sensibilities. Granted, that's coming from me, and I'm abnormal in that I usually put a lot of time into building my characters' family histories so that I know what assumptions they make based on the specifics of how they were raised. My tactic is almost always to build their psyche from the ground up, starting in childhood. I make sure I know their hometown, their parents, their education, etc. But I think the larger point stands which is that portraying a culture (and other aspects of how one was raised) isn't about the visual window dressing, it's about the foundational assumptions about life that get ingrained into someone over the years, and how that affects their behavior as adults.
Shorter version: even if it "doesn't matter" on the surface of how someone self-presents - there are always REASONS for what does and doesn't matter to someone and how they choose to present themselves culturally.
I did say "barely matter"as the highest level, not ignore it. And I think you need to be careful with culture. It's not like Indians have different psychology. They can have all kinds of traits, including picking up traits from other cultures.
Yeah but I think it kind of think that cultural context has to matter a lot to everyone. We can't really escape it. We chose how to react to it, whether or not to accept it, and how much of it we perpetuate, but I think it's always important and always matters. But again, I actually write specifically about the various ways people are shaped by their cultural contexts, so this is a hobby horse of mine
Continuing @Commandante Lemming's excellent comments with my own personal experience, similar to his. I was born the son of a taxi driver with an eighth grade education in Western North Carolina, yet somehow showed a lot of smarts at an early age, and my parents, helped by some friends, put me through the Catholic school system, which I think may not have quibbled too much over the tuition. As you may guess, taxi drivers with eighth grade educations didn't make much money in the 50s. I lived in a poor neighborhood, but a lot of my friends were, by my standards, very wealthy... in 1960 or so, I thought anyone making more than $100 a week was rich. I joined the Naval Reserve (NAS Atlanta) in 1965 while still a junior in high school, because college was not in the offing. The 2X6 program then offered three month active duty for training in the summer, boot camp and airman training the first year, and A-school training to make rate the second. This was to be followed by two years' active duty, entering as a third class, maybe making second by the end. So I could be going to college on the GI bill before I was 21. Looked good. So I had my first summer on my own, though it was boot camp and not home, and the petty officers had no problems letting me know they were not my mother or my father, if indeed such a low life as myself had such things! In of all places NAS Olathe Kansas! Then drilling weekends once a month while a senior in HS, with no adult supervision in Atlanta. You know what appealed to me? Some of my shipmates in that bootcamp were from extremely wealthy families, one was enrolled in a military boarding school. But shave our heads, take away our civilian clothes, line us up side beside in exactly identical clothes, and for once I wasn't self-conscious about looking poor, we all looked the same, and shorn of our detachable symbols of "identity", we each had to look inside ourselves for the things that really made us individuals. The Navy had other ideas though. The reserve unit had been pushing officer programs, and one of the pieces of paper that I signed, on that first day of recruitment when you get arm cramps from signing papers, was an application for a reserve billet assignment to the Naval Academy. There are 160 billets reserved for active duty sailors, another 160 for reserve, most of which go unfilled each year. To my surprise I was picked up, and graduated with the class of 1970, to a most enjoyable navy career. I moved in two different worlds growing up, never comfortable in either, but if you don't think that cultural experience shaped me, just as @Commandante Lemming 's experience shaped him, well, I don't know what to tell you. I was, I think, thirty or so, before I was really comfortable in my own skin, no longer the self-conscious poor kid trying to hide the holes in his clothes. The culture you grow up in shapes you to your core, though wise persons will pick and choose what dictates of that culture they wish to follow and which to reject. You can pick and choose the values you take with you, but the shaping, you are stamped.
