Posted: November 2, 2024

Writing Across Cultures

As so often happens, last month's comments section inspired this month's column.

The commentor had written a fantasy story for a competition, and in order to create a sense of a strange and exotic world in as little space as possible, pulled a number of details from ancient China. The judges liked the story but ultimately rejected it because they felt the commentor was writing about a culture not her own. As the judges said, great writers had done this in the past, but "nowadays, ethnicity and authenticity are more significant."

So . . . when can you get away with creating characters who belong to another culture or race or gender or orientation -- someone with very different life experiences from your own?

First, a caveat. I'm a 63-year-old straight white man who grew up in a thoroughly homogeneous culture -- Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania. Nearly the entire population was white, originally settlers from Connecticut and Philadelphia overlaid with immigrants who came over from eastern Europe in the nineteenth century to work the mines. A mixed marriage at the time was Polish Catholic marrying Italian Catholic. I've never had to worry about being shot during a traffic stop or that my family would cut off contact because I fell in love with the wrong person, and I'm sure I take that privilege for granted.

But given that caveat . . . part of the art of writing is putting yourself in someone else's head. You should be able to do that even with a character who has had very different life experiences from your own. That is, after all, what imagination is for. Abandoning this approach to fiction is what gave us the old joke about MFA programs producing a lot of first novels about MFA students struggling with their first novel.

On the other hand, cultural appropriation is a thing. If you try to place your story in a culture different from your own or center your dramatic tension on the hardships you've never faced yourself -- i.e. write about experiences you haven't lived -- you run the risk of being shallow or exploitative or both. How do you put yourself in the head of someone very different from yourself without offending the very people you're writing about?

First, this applies only to realistic stories set in the modern world. If you're writing from the point of view of a twelfth-century French peasant and get the attitudes wrong, you're only going to upset a group of medieval historians. If you're writing from the point of view of a methane-based floating jellyfish living in the clouds of Jupiter, then you don't have to worry.

And most of the time, the question never arises. Most writers base their characters on themselves, so they tend to not stray too far from their lived experience to get their stories told. But sometimes, for dramatic reasons, you're called on to write about someone who's further from yourself in critical ways. What should you watch for?

Back in 1999, I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly that stuck with me: "Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students." In it, Claude Steele, a Stanford psychology professor, told of work he and colleagues did on why Black students often underperform in college compared to their record of achievement after they graduate. Steele and his colleagues focused on what they called "stereotype threat," the danger that people will judge you, not by your own character (over which you have some control) but by their preconceived prejudices (over which you have none).

To understand stereotype threat, they gave a test designed to be difficult -- graduate-level questions given to sophomores -- to various groups of Black and white students. One group was told that the test was simply a way to gauge various cognitive approaches -- that the answers didn't matter as much as the way students got to them. Another group was told it was an intelligence test. Both Black and white students did equally well in the first group, but Black students fared worse in the second. Steele and his colleagues argued that this was because the Black students were afraid of inadvertently confirming to the stereotype that Black people were less intelligent (this was when The Bell Curve was making the rounds). That fear led them to withdraw and not give the test their best efforts.

But Steele's most intriguing finding -- and I think this is why the article stuck with me for more than 20 years -- was that stereotype threat is common to all humans. In another experiment, a deliberately difficult math test was given to various groups of white students. In one group, the proctor happened to mention that Asian students had done particularly well on the test. That group fared worse.

Finding that common humanity may be the key to writing about people with different lives without condescension, misappropriation, or simple myopia. I've sometimes felt stereotype threat myself, not as seriously as someone who's lived in a culture full of prejudice, but in ways that might let me imagine myself into the head of someone who has. And you can always learn about the lived experiences of people different from yourself by talking to them, reading what they've written, doing the work of imagining yourself into their heads. If you invest enough work into it, you can create characters who are recognizably human to everyone who reads them.

It may even be that acts of imagination like this could help heal some of the rifts that keep us apart.