NOW... The baby you conceived in your spirit landed on paper and is off at school being check by professionals who search forensically for errors you overlooked while locked in the joys of parenthood... Ahh, the novelist's life!
THIS IS A FUN EXERCISE for you to do with your novel. This exercise will enable you to grow closer to each character and gather skills that will pop up later when asked questions about them in interviews. Let's go.
Rabbit Redemption, Book Three of the Rabbit Trilogy is the baby and today I want to share some little things about character gender and race (ethnicity).
Writers know that your book actually writes itself, that the characters are alive and well in another dimension and they break through to enlist your help in making them alive in our world. Non-writers, though, wonder why we cast a woman in that role, or why does the hero have to be white (or black), or who decided the Hispanic man would be the killer? Etc. Etc. While it's true movie makers will often change the race and/or ethnicity of a character for the film version of a book, when the author wrote it, he or she had no choice, the author MUST write the character true, or the book won't work. If the author attempts to force a character into another race or gender, it will rebel so badly, writer's block develops. It's true!
RABBIT REDEMPTION has more male characters than female, but that's because in Books One and Two, the female lead and her female counterparts accomplished their task and do not appear here. For this post, I will stick to the characters for this book. Some of the characters are supernatural, but they have an appearance of being human, and in my novel world, they retain some of their ethnic culture and blend it with their paranormal traits.
For this post: RAKUM (the name of the long-lived race of blood drinkers/vampires)
MAIN CHARACTERS, I will group them in ethnicity and role (two females, F):
Canaan ~ Caucasian male, hero
Javier ~ Caucasian, hero
Kilmeade ~ Caucasian, hero
Chloe ~ Caucasian, supporting character (F)
Marcy ~ Caucasian, supporting character (F)
Stuart ~ Caucasian, minion
Isaac ~ Caucasian, villain
Boris ~ Black, minion
Kite ~ Black, minion
Polly ~ Black, minion & anti-hero
Guap ~ Hispanic, minion & anti-hero
Rafael ~ Hispanic, anti-hero
Santiago ~ Hispanic, supporting character
Isn't that fun! I literally spent MONTHS on my novel and have read it more than fifty times, and never realized some of the statistics we see here.
FIRST: I am Caucasian, so when I write I think white. That's a fact. My African-American writer friend and psychologist Dr. Jan Lightfoot and I have discussed this, how you write in your own ethnicity. That's not to say you can't write legitimate and REAL other-raced characters, but your brain starts out in your own familiarity.
SECOND: My Black and Hispanic characters were born into this world with sentience -- I didn't PLAN them. That is the amazing thing: writers know this! I just started typing and Rafael was born. He had Iago in his arms and Santiago came into our world. It's a BREAKING THROUGH that happens when you write.
THIRD: I didn't cause my characters to be good guys or bad guys. Like their race, they were born into this world as they are. Isaac is a devil -- literally -- and he is white. His very favorite minion is Black. Who knows why?
Anyway, go and list your characters and comment back with what you find! Next post will be about POV -- so many fun things we can do while our novels are off at the editors' house!
KEEP WRITING
Ellen C Maze (Sallas)
Evil Incarnate...
His favorite minion... Go figure?
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