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She was disturbed, and soon after, she wrote about it.
Later, reading over what shed written, she realized the story wasnt working.
She decided to sign up for an online creative writing course called Writing the Other.
My immediate thought was, well thats taking the easy way out!
J.K. Rowling, Lionel Shriver, and Kathryn Stockett have all caught heat for botching the job.
One of the goals of the course is to shift the conversation from whether to how.
Students learn to analyze their identities and the unconscious biases that shape their work.
They consider why some identities are more challenging to render than others.
They practice taking risks.
After taking the course, Saigal decided to set the story shed been working on aside.
This conversation is, of course, something all established writers are reckoning with today.
I spoke to ten authors about how and why they decide to write outside their identities.
Some found their interior lives uninteresting; others were compelled to represent the diverse worlds they inhabited.
There is no exact formula, says Laila Lalami, author of the National Book Award finalistThe Other Americans.
But thats what makes the work exciting.
I wrote that character partly to subvert expectations.
I wanted to have a character who wasnt anybodys stereotypical version of a black woman.
What I probably did is I imagined a privileged white woman and poured this black woman inside of her.
My last book was the first Ive worked on with a sensitivity reader.
Harold, an African-American character inMrs.
Id look at blogs and social media and talk to black friends.
What is his hair like?
Because thats going to be different than it is with a white guy.
What are they doing when everyone comes home for the holiday?
Who is this person, really?
Thats the central question for any novelist.
Scouring Tumblr
N. K. Jemisin,The Broken Earth Trilogy
Its all the same craft.
What changes is our willingness about what to prioritize.
Nobody gave a damn about race or gender or any of these other identities.
Now its a writerly virtue to get people right.
Ive learned to not fear obviousness when Im describing race or topics related to oppression.
When I first describe a character, I sometimes hang a lampshade on race.
My narrator will immediately think: She might be Latino, oh maybe not, she might be Indian.
I render that mental process.
Youre not going to be perfect.
As I now know, disability as a superpower is a trope.
Ehiru, a character fromThe Killing Moon, is asexual, and I dont think I explored that well.
If I were writing it now, I would have made him more clearly ace.
I figured this out by reading Tumblr.
I am on Tumblr quietly I have a pseudonym, and nobody knows who I am.
I thought about it as a broken sexuality.
My story reflected my lack of understanding of how that worked.
Maybe because I cant help trying to protect myself.
Shed met her husband on a site designed to connect Western men with Eastern women.
We exchanged information, and she spent a bunch of time emailing with me.
I showed her some of what Id written so far, and she really liked the idea.
Ive never done a book this way before, and I worried about it constantly.
Theres one thing I might do differently if I were writing today.
I would still write the book from her perspective today, because my relationship with her is genuine.
But I didnt go far enough to find a way in the novel to justify what I was doing.
I would almost like the essay-writing plot to be a framing structure for the book.
But eventually, I realized they were right, because it didnt read like an actual human wrote it.
There wasnt an emotional truth there.
So in rewrites I had to go back.
I wrote 40 or 50 pages of this womans backstory that never made it into the book.
Im not sure I want to keep exploring blackness in relief with whiteness.
Im still interested in writing the other, though.
The project Im working on now is about black Americans and Haitians, and thats scarier than writing white.
Even doing research on it, its difficult to find emotional and historical truths.
Thats why Im doing it because its a challenge.
In that book, my protagonist was a white guy.
I started by imagining a different body.
The main character, Pepper, hes six-four, 250 pounds and Im not that.
I cant imagine how anyones interior life is not formed by the body they got born into.
I read a lot of history books about these women, and journals they kept.
The more I read about these women, I noticed this undercurrent I really connected to.
I really identified with that.
How do we draw that line?
Thats a thing Ill wrestle with until Im dead.
Whats fun is that not everyone wrestles with it in the same way.
InhabitingaRacist
Laila Lalami,The Other Americans
I dont find myself a very interesting person.
Im interested in the world around me.
Having said that, I really believe that in each of these characters theres some connection to me.
Researchisessential, but there comes a moment when you have to let go of that research and start writing.
InThe Other Americans, I have one character whos an out-and-out racist.
Whats the way to enter a character like that?
It wasnt a question of two or three drafts.
It took much longer.
This book took nine drafts and four and a half years.
It took me a long time to even admit to myself that thats what I wanted to do.
Its about a white American who undergoes racial-reassignment surgery and becomes a black person.
I did a lot of research.
Theres a whole American literature on the subject books likePassing.
But the other thing I had to do was really search my own background.
My editor and I had a lot of questions about why exactly my protagonist chooses to do this.
Is there really such a thing as a transracial person who actually believes that they are black?
My answer to those questions was yes.
Ive always experienced cross-racial longing, and that translates into my fiction.
I said to the student, That assumes Im comfortable writing from a white perspective, and Im not.
Ive never been comfortable with normative representations of white American characters.
Im always looking to undermine and deconstruct and take apart those representations.
Thats the material Im drawn to, and its also the material of my life.
Theyre all connected by a white writer named Lafcadio Hearn.
This book took me eight years to research and write.
I had questions about Hearn and his women.
She concerned me most for good reason.
What does it mean for an Asian-American woman to write in the voice of a formerly enslaved woman?
And how can you not be confronted with that question every single day?
The way I think about it is I honestly believe stories belong to all of us.
So how do you resolve these two things?
You have to work with both.
And that tells me as much about her as it does about me.
How Im dependent on certain tropes, where my humor lies, where my assumptions lie.
There is an inevitable failure in my trying to write these women.
We have that desire, and the tension is: Why do we do it?
Do we do it for ourselves?
Does it make us feel better?
Are we rescuing a bird or something?
I think a lot of it is for ourselves.
If you acknowledge that there is a failure in the project, in an odd way it frees you.
I had an experience of interracial life that straight white people of my generation often didnt.
Take Meg Wolitzer because she was straight, she was in an all-white literary world.
I learned by writing about the people who were reading those newspapers.
It was a very interactive readership if they didnt like what I wrote, they would tell me.
My first characters with AIDS showed up inPeople in Trouble.
The one I think worked was an Asian lesbian rocker named Melanie Chang.
She was kind of based on someone I knew.
And then there was a kind of fake black best-friend character who didnt work.
She wasnt based on anyone I knew.
The characters who were based on people I knew were better characters at first.
Ive been told I got it wrong.
She said a black person wouldnt be hung up on this.
I thought,Okay, I didnt have the awareness to be accurate.
It motivated me to work harder.
Although, her statement has since been contradicted by other people.
Thats the other thing.
There is no monolithic black opinion.
I asked Tayari Jones to read that manuscript and she said, Yep, theyre black.
Its about being in conversation with people.
But that only goes so far.
The idea that anti-black violence is a black issue lets white people off the hook.
Creating a character is this weird combination of craft and a supernatural experience.
At a certain point, your consciousness starts doing things.
I did more research forUnderground Airlinesthan any other book I did.
As I revised, lines of dialogue rang false.
Were all too inclined to let our writing be informed by other books and other kinds of entertainment.
I feel nervous even now, talking about this.
I tried to see to it my book was not of that tradition.
*An earlier version of this piece quoted Nell Freudenbergeras saying metaphysical gadget.
In fact, she said, metafictional rig.
