: Re: Writing diversity I am writing a military sci-fi novel about an international military force facing aliens. My cast is very diverse: the MC is Yemenite-Israeli, his love interest is German, his

@Sue2132873

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Diversity cannot be covered by breadth - instead use depth.

There's only one book in this world that has a chance of representing everyone who deserves to be represented, and that's the phone book. And even that fails miserably.

Instead what you have to do is imply depth. You have to make your reader feel like they have a window into an incredibly diverse world, and if only they could stick their heads in and look around they would be able to see all the diversity that couldn't fit on the page.

A good way to do this is ambiguity. If the only physical feature of the waiter mentioned is their curly dark hair... well, that gives the reader some information about what their ethnicity probably is, but the reader can't know for sure. And the childhood friend mentioned in passing name Omar has a high likelyhood of being Arabic and probably Muslim, but they could just as easily be anything else.

This applies to characters as well as the world itself. The harder it is to fit the characters into a few small boxes, the less like they will feel like stereotypes of those boxes.

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