Writing Identity

I hope that academics out there—those that read paranormal romance, that is—don’t throw a fit when they see how I’ve incorporated nepotism casually and without remorse into a post-graduate program in a biochemistry department at a high ranking state university.

Since it’s backstory and fiction, I’m taking liberties.

I am not going to worry about offending academic sensibilities with a minor re-envisioning of academic life just to suit my plot. I have seen academia represented in some pretty weird ways.

“My real concern is how I develop my characters and how I portray them. ”

My MC is half-Japanese American and half Latinx, first generation American, and daughter of academics. Her Japanese dad is a widower raising his daughter alone, and he is a helicopter dad. I am comfortable with representing my MC’s Latinx identity, since I am Latinx. Her dad is another story.

Tiger dad? Yes and no. He’s a concerned, over-protective, and for the purpose of the plot, somewhat controlling of his daughter’s education and professional career. But honestly, you don’t need to be a tiger dad to check all those boxes.

What about the MC’s half-Asian-American identity? This is something I can’t speak to personally.

I’ve been looking into issues of cultural sensitivity. I’ve attended webinars such as Alex Temblador’s ""Writing an Identity Not Your Own" through the Writer’s League of Texas. Ultimately, it comes down to being respectful of the identities that we are portraying and taking the time to learn about them. But the subtleties of how to represent identities go well beyond simply being respectful. There’s a learning curve.

The nuance behind what that might entail is interesting. There’s the issue of physical attributes and there’s the issue of cultural characteristics and stereotyping. Writing with Color has been a great resource when it comes to describing physical attributes.

A big topic that draws a lot attention is skin color. A rule of thumb is to not use foods like coffee or chocolate, or even honey, to describe skin tone. These are tired clichés, and they reference agricultural products that conjure colonist attitudes towards the populations that are being described, interestingly enough. Something I hadn’t thought about.

The alternatives to using food to describe skin color are interesting. One suggestion is to see what cosmetics manufacturers are using to describe skin tone. My MC has rose-toned, fawn-colored skin. Too much? I’m still working on this.

I was relieved to discover I don’t have to describe eyes. In The Kissing Quotient, Helen Hoang describes a whole Vietnamese-American family with no mention of physical attributes beyond general body shapes and tattoos. No mention of eye shape, for example, like *almonds*.

What Hoang does is bring you into the chaotic kitchen of a Vietnamese grandmother and mother and her very American children to show aspects of the heritage culture intertwined with the culture of residence. It was subtle, but it brought out the hero’s identity beautifully.

There are too many areas where authors can flesh out the identities of their character to mention here. One that I have been considering is accents.

The resounding advise on accents is don’t do it unless you are familiar with the language, dialect, or variation. There is lots on the webverse about whether to write or describe accents. I have a Ph.D. in linguistics, I can write phonetically, and I grew up in a house full of accents (my mother is Colombian, my father Dutch). yet I do not like venturing into writing accents. I can do it for research, but not for entertainment.

Luckily, there is a lot of discussion on how writer’s can capture the identities of their characters in their speech beyond trying to write them phonetically. This post about writing accents has great tips for alluding to accents using specific tricks without actually trying to write the accents themselves.

I will be hiring a sensitivity reader. I don’t want to be exploiting the notion of tiger dad if it perpetuates a stereotype. Although the MC’s dad is a helicopter parent. I don’t think that’s so unusual for an first generation American, academic, widower raising his baby girl alone. I suspect it’s a universal. What I’m not sure of is whether it is appropriate to use the term.