How do you go about choosing the gender identity/ethnicity/sexuality of your characters?

I acknowledge the sense in your sentiment and point of view. It's not the way I write my stories, tho. Like most people who pitch a tent in the Planning Camp, I have a very particular story I want to tell. I engage my characters as actors. They have a job to do, a role to play, a story to tell that I already know. As I mentioned in my above post, this is not to say that there are never rewrites of those roles or recasting of those actors. This does most certainly happen in my writing. But I'm never writing or making changes because of a drive to serve diversity. My casts are diverse, in gender, in sexuality, in race. But that's just how they come to me. If anyone were to laud me for "representation", I would have to decline the award. I certainly didn't write it that way with that in mind. That's just how it all coalesced. You and I may well be saying the same thing in different words for all I know, or approaching a similar ideal from different directions. All I can say is that my focus is always on the story I set out to tell. How I get there may change in the course of the journey, but I totally know where the journey ends.

 

And I personally prefer to take the George Orwell approach: "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

 

To me, that means that you're not wearing blinders that you need to take off, so the exercise of "how could this be different" isn't useful to you. I seem to be wearing blinders that I was not previously aware of, so that exercise is useful to me, even if the product of the exercise never ends up applying to the story that I'm, er, exercising with. I want to become aware of the blinders and break them down, so that I see a wider set of possibilities either this time or next time, because the best and most interesting possibility may be outside my current viewfinder. (OK, that metaphor just got kind of wobbly.)

As an example, when I kept telling myself, "No, you are NOT going to make this a Male Rescues Female scenario" for one situation in the HFN, and kept searching for another way, I finally came up with a way that was far more interesting than any of the rescue scenarios. The fact that it avoided a stereotype was perfectly nice, but the primary benefit was that it was just plain better.

 

I'm not suggesting that you plop a female character into a role of power, no. If you're writing purely about power (by which I mean, writing about the people and problems and strategies associated with power), there may be little to no role for anything but wealthy white upper-class adult males, or whatever the power demographic is in the fictional society in question.

But one of the possible advantages of considering other possibilities and trying to widen the viewfinder a little is looking at the idea that there are some very interesting stories that are not about power.

 

Hmmm...see usually I already have an idea of what I want when the pieces of a story are coming together in my head before I write. I already know I'm gonna have this guy, this girl, et cetra.

Now as far as sexuality, its easy for me to go back and forth because I'm bi. I'm writing an LGBT story now with two females and I already had the whole thing formulated in my head. If it's not an LGBT themed story, it's harder for me to decide. I would say it's pretty easy for me to decide a character's sexuality. Same goes for ethnicity.

 

A little off topic, but man this line alone kinda makes me want to read this book, I gotta know how the hell a self fertile ambulatory yew tree manages to save 4 people (and a better question yet, why in the name of Hades is there an ambulatory yew tree in this book?)

 

I'm saying that looking at diversity can widen your options for the story.

Imagine that you're a cook, and you discover that there's a whole world of flavors that you've never heard of or considered using before. You might seek opportunities to use those flavors, might go out of your way to find those opportunities, not because someone said that you morally should, but because you have no idea what they might add until you use them, and you're probably not going to get comfortable using them until you push your comfort zone and use them for a while despite not being comfortable.

 

But I think that a novel is a banquet, not a single dish. I totally might find a way to put dishes with new flavors into an already-partly-planned banquet. Especially when some of those flavors are perfectly fitting for the theme and I just failed to realize or remember that fact.

 

What if the reason you're told you're not allowed to use cumin is "you're supposed to use red pepper instead. Every single time"?

 

Honestly this is a really interesting cast of characters and yup a talking, walking, cursing tree is definitely at home here. I'll say this, and I'm genuinely serious, if this was on the back cover of your book, it would be enough to sell me on it. I'm intrigued to say the least

 

Fair enough. Would you like to look at a debate thread I started about diversity in media?

 

I'm shocked and appalled no one's writing a Finnish character.

If we're talking about flavors, that'd be sugar-free ice cream. In fact, no artificial sweeteners either -- or cream. Well, it's basically the flavor of water that's been kept in below 0 degrees Celsius for an hour. So basically ice.

 

Ah the ignorance. You clearly need to be educated.