THE AUTHOR/CHARACTER QUANDARY - Late Last Night Books

When you’re reading a novel, do you ever question the authenticity of the characters because they’re different from the author? Can male authors create realistic female characters? Can female authors create convincing men? What about white authors writing black characters and vice versa? These questions have been around since the beginning of literature. When the male/female issue is raised, critics like to cite the rich characterization of Madame Bovary, a testament to Gustave Flaubert’s understanding of a particular woman. And yet even great novelists can stumble. I’ve always contended that the male characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula are not as complex as the female characters and that the novel (excellent as it is) suffers for that.

When The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron was published in 1967, black critics banded together to denounce Styron and the novel. Black writers called Styron a racist, a liar, and an apologist for slavery. Although the novel won the Pulitzer Prize, critics and readers proclaimed Styron had no right to think he could tell Nat Turner’s personal story.

More recently, similar outcries resounded in response to Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. In an article published in The Feminist Wire , professor, lawyer, and author Duchess Harris wrote, “But when [The Help] attempts to enter the mindset of the Black women, like Aibleen or her best friend Minny, suddenly we enter the realm of the ridiculous. Although Stockett’s writing shows her talent, her ignorance of the real lives of the Black women bleeds through.”

If ignorance of the real lives of people of other races and genders can “bleed through,” creating characters with different sexual orientations or economic situations must be difficult, too. Can a straight middle-class author write about poor Colombian immigrants or a gay man who loses his job? Can authors realistically create any characters who are fundamentally different from themselves?

I think the answer is yes.

I think a good writer can create characters from different races, genders, classes, or any life situation with authenticity, although certainly some characters require more research and vetting than others. In my novel Surface and Shadow, one of the characters is mentally challenged. Early in my revising, I asked a veteran teacher of special needs children and adults to read the novel and tell me if that character rang true. The teacher’s remarks were invaluable in revising and shaping the character.

The most important key to creating genuine characters, whether they are like the author or not, is thinking of the character as a person, not a type of person.

Harrison Demchick, author of The Listeners, wrote on Romance University : “If you set out to write a woman or a man, that’s exactly what you’ll do: write your idea of a generic woman or your idea of a generic man rather than the individual character you should always be trying to craft.” People are people, regardless of their circumstances. If authors shed any stereotypical ideas they have of how particular people think or behave, they may be able to gain some understanding of others and use that to create believable characters.

They may also become better people, themselves. And that is what I think readers can bring to the author/character quandary. Readers who question the authenticity of a character should ask themselves why the character doesn’t seem real. Maybe the character is a stereotype. Worse yet, maybe the character is a caricature. But when a character is fully drawn as a complete human being, gender and race and other qualities aren’t as significant.

So while none of us can presume to know exactly how people from other life circumstances think or feel, and writers and readers may be called biased or ignorant for writing or talking about it, we need to try. As Kathryn Stockett writes, in an afterword to The Help, “I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in 1960s. . . . But trying to understand is vital to our humanity.”

What do you think? Can authors create authentic characters who differ from the author in gender, race, sexual orientation, class, or other attributes? What responsibilities do readers have in approaching such characters?

Sally Whitney

Sally Whitney is the author of When Enemies Offend Thee and Surface and Shadow, available now from Pen-L Publishing, Amazon.com, and Barnesandnoble.com. When Enemies Offend Thee follows a sexual-assault victim who vows to get even on her own when her lack of evidence prevents police from charging the man who attacked her. Surface and Shadow is the story of a woman who risks her marriage and her husband’s career to find out what really happened in a wealthy man’s suspicious death.

Sally’s short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Best Short Stories from The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2017, Main Street Rag, Kansas City Voices, Uncertain Promise, Voices from the Porch, New Lines from the Old Line State: An Anthology of Maryland Writers and Grow Old Along With Me—The Best Is Yet to Be, among others. The audio version of Grow Old Along With Me was a Grammy Award finalist in the Spoken Word or Nonmusical Album category. Sally’s stories have also been recognized as a finalist in The Ledge Fiction Competition and semi-finalists in the Syndicated Fiction Project and the Salem College National Literary Awards competition.