On Diversity

This article just popped up on Facebook (sorry, I've already forgotten who posted it) which reminded me of a topic that's been roaming around in my head for a couple of weeks.

Read the article here

I don't want to start an argument about affirmative action or institutional racism, but I do want to point out something people have been talking about in YA recently. I can point you to plenty of blog posts and stats if you need them, but basically, there isn't a lot of diversity in YA.

There's not a lot of diversity in most media, if you think about it. True, there's a lot of supporting characters who are minorities in race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, whatever else you can be a minority in. There are even some main characters like this, just not the ones that get talked about. Twilight? A bunch of white kids (as far as I can tell from two chapters and the movie trailers). Harry Potter? The main characters are all white.

I'm not criticizing these or any authors for writing "normal" white characters. I just think it's something we ignore that we need to think about. I read a fabulous book recently, Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves, and didn't realize until halfway through the book that the MC is half-Finnish...and half-black. It took a while for my visual image of characters in Tamora Pierce's Trickster series to match their actual skin colors. I'm just as guilty as assuming whiteness as anyone else.

However, I don't think the biggest thing YA lacks is racial/ethnic diversity. What you really don't see often are gay main characters or characters with any sort of disability. (The one thing YA is amazingly good at is family diversity. It seems like almost no one in teen or children's books has a nice, traditional nuclear family.)

So, partially inspired by this, I added a deaf character to More Blessed and decided to make the MC's hometown resemble...several countries in Asia. I want to point out that I wouldn't have done this just to make it more diverse. Delaney needed a friend she couldn't talk to, so she signs instead. The city she lives in didn't have any culture, so I'm giving it one.

I also realized just a minute ago that I haven't been making updates on my book like I was supposed to. I got a bunch of work in this weekend, including a lot of words, some plotting and backstory, and changing the genders of one of my characters. There are currently 14 pages of story and who knows how many of other stuff :)

Official More Blessed Word Count: 5,451