Duffy is 17, straight-but-different, and bipolar. He has lived his entire life in Billings, Montana.
Aisha is 19, a lesbian, and black. She has lived in several small Midwestern cities, as her father is an assistant coach for the Indoor Football League.
They are best friends because they just get each other.
Do you notice what I did there? Did I mention Duffy is white? I did not. And I didn't have to. Because I am Caucasian, it feels like a safe bet to me that readers will assume my first-person protagonist will also be Caucasian. My characters, I seem to assume, are "Me" characters except where they diverge from "Me."
Anyhow, I am currently trying to "get" their voices. And what is a voice? At its worst, a voice can be mimicked from things we've heard. We "hear" the Mexican woman in front of us in line at the grocery store as she talks on her cell phone, and we ape her voice. I say that's the worst because it's entirely exterior. We cannot come to know a character on the inside by simply copying her dialect. At best, we come to know our characters from the inside-out, and when they speak, readers will be able to sense the authenticity of that person, because they are a person. Fully a person.
Still, I find that I am up against something here. I have never been black. I have never been a lesbian, especially a somewhat butch one. My fears have always been of being seen as less masculine and therefore different, not "too masculine" and therefore different.
How do I approach her voice? How do I make her real? For that matter, how do I make both of them real? Despite what one misguided doctor said when I was 19, I have never been bipolar. How do I access that life experience?
I can never be anyone other than me, try as I might. I will never be inside another person and I will never inhabit their brain. So how dare I write their innermost thoughts? How can fiction ever be authentic, since we are writing characters who are not us?
We have to find authenticity by inhabiting these people as best we can. That is the answer. We have to do our best to not just empathize, but actually merge as we write. Imagination helps. No, I don't know what it's like to be black, but I do know what it's like to feel different. No, I don't know what it's like to be bipolar, but I do know what it's like to not entirely trust my brain.
The end result (if I'm lucky) will be characters who sound like themselves. That self will have quite a bit of me in it, but also a lot of not me. That's vague, but purposefully so. I need to start with the one human I know by heart, and that's me, and then I have to see difference. Which is exactly why, above, I didn't mention that Duffy is white. Like me. I only mentioned the things about those two characters that diverge from my own story.
What I will do is write my friend Kriste letters from both characters in first person. I send these emails and often while I'm writing them the voice clicks in. I begin to understand from where these characters are coming. Aisha doesn't walk around thinking "I'm black" any more than Duffy walks around thinking "I'm white." Yet you better believe it's a huge factor in how she sees herself, especially living in a place like Billings, where almost everyone is white. But my point is, she doesn't have my inner voice as I try to understand "blackness." She has her own inner voice, which I need to find.
What do you think? Are there dangers in writing across race? Sexuality? Gender? Mental Illness? What does a writer need to keep in mind? Or is this just a bunch of gobbledygook?
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