: Re: Should we avoid having a protagonist of a different ethnicity than ours if we don't know anything about their culture? Let's say I am thinking about making an Indian protagonist who lives in

@Phylliss352

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If writers only stick to their own background, we'll be slower to bring diversity into fiction. Besides which, in what ways should your protagonist be like you? If mine have to be white, do they also have to be Silhillian, fat, clever, pro-EU, a software engineer born in 1988 with a half-sibling etc.? What's so special about nationality or ethnicity that I can't be trusted to sympathise with someone different? If anyone can not only do that but also help others to do so, history shows it's great writers.

But be prepared to change your story as you learn. You don't want to be the Aladdin author who thought China was full of Muslims with the occasional Jew. You want to be the team behind Coco, who cancelled their plan for the film to be about letting go of a dead mother when they learned the whole point of Día de Muertos is instead to remember the dead.

You don't do it, by the way, to be inoffensive. A ridiculous misrepresentation of Indians won't leave them clutching pearls; it'll just be silly and boring. Because when you really understand another culture and what makes it tick, you can give your audience something they've never seen before, which is what people want. Coco had a much more creative story for understanding its topic. It'll make you want to learn Spanish.

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