I’ve been substitute teaching in Humanities classes at my local middle and high schools recently, and I went shopping for a rainbow badge lanyard because I can’t wear my “I Read Banned Books” shirt every day. I’ve seen other teachers with rainbows on their badge holders, or ally pins attached to them, and it reminds me of book events where the pins attached to a reader’s lanyard tell you which authors they’ve seen – sort of a “tell me what you read and I’ll know who you are” thing. Those rainbow pins and badge holders on teachers tell every kid they come into contact with that they’re a safe person for LGBTQ+ identities. And maybe (hopefully) many more people at every school site are safe too, but the ones who say it out loud with a rainbow are showing their inclusion on purpose.
I wrote Marking Time, my first novel, twelve years ago. It was a story I wanted to read (my first rule for every author), about a young woman with skills and a growing confidence I wish I’d had when I was her age. I included a lot of myself and my world in that book, as most authors who follow the “write what you know” dictate do, and when I finally had it in the kind of condition a first novel needs to be before you give it to your most discerning friend with a professional editing history, I was pretty confident I’d written a good book. My friend, who is, incidentally, now my editor, handed it back with a page full of notes, and words which I’ll never forget: “It’s really good, but there aren’t any non-white characters in it. Did you mean to do that?”
It was bad enough to realize that my education hadn’t included all the people of color who lived in Victorian London, and to understand that my automatic default was to make everyone white and straight, but the worst was the last question – had I meant to do that?
The answer was an emphatic NO! No, I had not intended to write exclusively about characters who more or less looked like me, and from that moment until now, I have been deliberately inclusive in my work. I have written main characters who are white, Black, Middle Eastern, East Asian, Indigenous North American, and mixed race. I have written in a first person voice as a straight woman, straight man, gay man and a transgender woman, and I have done the research for so many more characters who do not look, identify, or love like me.
To be clear, I don’t just write the characters into my stories, I make very deliberate choices about whether their identities are integral to the plot or incidental to it, because that determines my focus on those identities. Research and sensitivity readers are absolutely vital to my books, and I have learned so much about the world I live in because I’ve tried to examine it through the eyes of diverse characters. I’ve been criticized for writing outside my lane as if my inclusion takes space away from underrepresented authors who are writing from lived experience. It would be a valid complaint if I were traditionally published by a company with a quota for how many “Black” or “gay” books they’ll put out in any given year (you can’t hear the disgust in my written voice, but it’s there, along with an eye-roll and snort of disdain for anything less than full representation). But I stand by the fact that my independently published books don’t take shelf space away from own-voices books, and my readers can expect to learn something they may not have known about some bit of history or cultural significance that our predominantly white-and-straight-biased education didn’t teach, which hopefully leads them down their own rabbit hole of discovery.
As far as I’m concerned, the most important reason to be deliberately inclusive is that some kid somewhere might see a little bit of themselves in one of my books and know that they’re not the only ones out there looking, feeling, identifying, or loving the way they do. And just like my rainbow lanyard and my Banned Books shirt proclaim, I believe in rainbows and spectrums and humanity and happily ever afters for all, and if people see them in fiction often enough, maybe they’ll welcome them in real life too.
Beautifully said!!