Remember when Star Trek actually taught this?
Diversity. What should be just another part of writing something resembling our world, just with monsters, aliens, people in spandex flying around punching each other, mad scientists, wizards and sorceresses, and people who have and probably never will exist has somehow become a buzzword or sometimes even a shield against proclaiming a story bad. At the same time it can feel like a buzzword for “this is going to be ‘woke’ garbage”, even by members of the group the story claims to be representing. Surprisingly nobody is part of a hivemind based on race, gender, or even shared values. Not every Christian agrees with each other on every topic, even the big ones like abortion.
So how do we get good representation AND good storytelling. Can we? Since I’m doing a slowdown this week to get some backlogged projects caught up (and my apologies to the new subscribers that just started following me this weekend–I promise if I’m not back by Friday there will be a Saturday Night Showcase and return to form on Monday) I’m not going to leave you without articles to read. I’ll just tap other people’s articles, like author James Harrington discussing how to do better diversity in your stories, so you have representation AND good writing. Don’t you think these groups that supposedly are underrepresented deserve to have good stories instead of garbage that wouldn’t work if the protagonist was a straight white male?
BW Media Spotlight 