Hi!
I'm clearly not Lily, but Lily's allowing me to talk to you about diversity
today.
My name's Tamara and I'm an author and a writer and I wanted to talk to you about
writing about your ethnicity in your stories.
Logo Intro with music by David Bello
We all want to represent our own experiences in our writing.
We want to tell our stories.
It's important.
It's one of the reasons that makes writing and reading so interesting, because when there's
people that have these diverse viewpoints, and places and life, things that they're
doing, and you get to experience little pieces of their world.
It's incredible.
I am incredibly biased but hopefully you are too and you love the written word as well.
As I said, I'm going to come to you today and give you some… a few tips that I've
learned as I've been writing my current novel, which is a cozy mystery and my main
character Issadora or Issa is black.
Just to give you a little bit of background, she lives in a very small town in West Virginia
where she's definitely a "minority" minority.
Much like myself was.
And please let me know down in the comments what you think, because conversation makes
all of this fun.
I'm going to give you these tips from my point of view and talking in terms of being
black, however, I think these tips can be applied across different
races, nationalities, genders, and sexual orientations, et cetera.
But I'm just coming to you from where I am.
So I had this story I wanted to write.
I wanted to write about a cozy mystery with an African-American lead.
And the first bit of advice that I will give to you that I learned is that I had to be
true to myself.
[on screen: Be True To Yourself] I had to be true to my experiences and the
story that was playing in my head.
I had to write about things as I saw them and how I felt she would feel.
Things that I thought would be relevant in the situation.
Things that I thought would happen in a small town with the situations that I was creating.
And I had to remember that my story wasn't going to represent every single black person
and every single black person's experience.
I can't expect these 75,000 words to represent every black person in West Virginia and Chicago
and Nairobi and Australia and London and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
That is impossible.
And to put that much weight on myself and my story would be a disservice.
But They might find a little bit of themselves
there.
And if not they might just find something that's funny, something that they think's
interesting, that they can relate to, something that they can connect with.
And here's the thing I think sometimes people do really, really want so much to see themselves
in a story and they feel upset or cheated because the character didn't do what they
expected someone who's Black to do.
Or they don't speak the way a Black person should speak.
[finger quotes] should speak.
Or whatever.
But that's when I had to remind myself [On Screen: You can't control readers'
opinions.]
anybody else's opinion is really none of my business.
I can not control how people think, feel, respond and react to my work.
The only thing I can do is to write it to the best of my ability, to try to create an
interesting and fun and enjoyable story and to send it out into the universe.
It's mine, I created it, and I have to own it.
Now owning it and being tone death when people tell you that there's an issue involved
in your story that is harmful to people And that you need to look into that.
When your sensitivity readers or beta readers, are signaling to you- hey there's a problem
here…
That's different from owning it, that's just being tone deaf.
I'm not even going to go into that topic.
I feel like if you've been on I don't know Twitter for the past four, three years
and you've been a part of the YA community You've uh…you've come across this…
once or twice.
-But anyway- One aspect of writing about someone being
Black and imagining people who weren't black were going to end up reading it was that I
wondered- How much should I explain?
And then I realized No.
No.
I'm trying to share an authentic kind of vision into this world.
[On Screen- Don't over explain the character's life.]
Every little piece of minutiae is not going to be explained.
For instance there is a part where I talk about her having a wash day and I'm talking
about her baby hairs.
In the context of what's written around there, people should be able to figure out
what that means if they've never run across these words before.
And if they want to know more information then Google is there to help them.
I'm not writing a research paper.
I'm not writing a dissertation.
This is not a nonfiction novel about the African-American experience.
This is just a fiction book about this really cool chick who is doing some bomb stuff.
[On Scene- Know the important themes/tropes of your genre]
The thing I needed to keep in mind is the tropes from the genre.
Like I said I am writing a cozy mystery, and a cozy mystery there's quite a few things
to keep in consideration.
And let me tell you the stuff that's important for, let's say, the main character.
In the average cozy mystery, the main character is a white, female, who is very intelligent,
a little bit nosy, who feel invested- personally invested- in the murders that occur, and she
is not a detective or someone who works in the law industry in a professional capacity.
Keeping that in consideration, Issa she too is all of these things, except she's black,
she has a hella afro, and she's bomb.
But I kept all of those same characteristics,
those same tropes in the story, because when someone who loves cozy mysteries comes to
read my story, I want them to have that familiarity and to have those things that make a cozy…cozy.
[On Screen- Don't fall into the Stereotypes Trap]
Another thing that I was worried about was playing into stereotypes.
You know- I know- I know you've had this- I know you've had this before.
Where you're reading a book and you're into it and it's cool and things are going
and then there's just that…one part where the author threw in a stereotype and you just
kind of cringe and why is that there?
And it's something that clearly the author hadn't thought about at all.
And it's jarring.
It doesn't help with the story and it takes you out of it for a second.
Granted, I'm a person who sensitive to those and I check for them when I'm reading.
And it's not even, it's not an on purpose thing it's just my brain is like- eh why
did they do that?- and I notice it.
And because I'm a person who lives in this society and I consume this media, that too
is in my head.
So I wanted to make sure that in this novel, that's not happening.
If there is a stereotype, I want to be playing with it.
I wanting to be turning it on its head, I don't just want to be feeding into it.
One thing I did Everybody knows the stereotype that black
people love fried chicken- even though people who eat meat love fried chicken too because
it's delicious- But anyway-
I decided that even though it might not have been anything that anyone else would notice.
It made me uncomfortable.
It made me feel like I was feeding into a stereotype.
Since I am the first gatekeeper, the first editor, the first person consuming this media
even before I share it, I wanted to feel better about it.
So that was something that I deleted.
And I would caution you to be aware of any stereotypes that you put into with your stories
and either take them out, address them in some way, or take them and flip the hell out
of them.
And just make it that much more interesting for your reader.
And of course remember this is ultimately your story and your vision.
Keep true to that.
Thank you so much for having me Lily and thank you so much dear viewers for checking me out.
I hope that you enjoyed this.
Please go down in the comments and let's have a chit chat.
My name is Tamara and I talk about writing and books and I do a weekly write-in on my
channel.
If you haven't already, please subscribe to Lily.
I love her work and I'm so honored that's she's allowing me to be here.
And if you have the time, go check out my channel, and if you like it there, please
subscribe.
Again thank you so much and I'll see you next time.
Bye.
For more infomation >> PR - The Funk Won't Let You Down (Dj XS Heated Rework) - Duration: 6:50. 
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