: Urban Writing Question I want to write an urban book that isn't ghetto, how would you suggest I go about this? It's a love story about two young females from a urban inner-city neighborhood.

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Some pieces of advice:

Do you know your setting well? If you don't have personal experience with an urban setting, your story is likely to be unrealistic and stereotypical. If this is the case, you might want to either change the setting or do some intensive research, preferably directly with people who resemble your characters (if possible).
Recognize that there are all kinds of people in all settings. There are people deep in poverty who are very refined and sophisticated, and people with lots of money who are very crude. If you are true to who your characters are, they don't have to be "ghetto" even if they live in a ghetto.
When I think of a quote "ghetto" story, I think of a flashy and melodramatic plotline: People being shot, going to jail, dealing drugs, being unfaithful, etc. --basically a soap opera with an inner-city setting. Your characters might still have to encounter some of those things (it's a statistical fact, for example, that if you are poor, black and live in an inner city neighborhood, your chances of dying violently are dramatically higher), but your story doesn't have to center around them. It can still be a quiet love story, even with occasional random gunfire in the background.
Remember, you as the author can use sophisticated language and writing style, no matter what the setting. Consider Zora Neale Hurston's classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The characters are uneducated, and speak exclusively in a poor black southern dialect, but the narrator's voice is richly poetic and sophisticated.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.
-Hurston, writing as the narrator

In addition, the characters often express sophisticated thoughts, even though they don't have the same breadth of language as the author:

Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.
-Hurston, writing dialog in character.

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