Representation Matters for Us Writers Too

I didn’t always know I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t until high school that I began taking the practice more seriously and started locking myself in my rooms just to write for hours uninterrupted. The chapters would come out in a flood. Segments that followed the main heroine who was just coming into her elemental powers, desperate to master them in order to fight against the hidden evil lurking in her town, and all the while trying to keep her composure around her handsome, albeit dangerously mysterious, crush.Typical fantasy stuff. However, there was one major problem that crippled my writing - my main character. I had written her as this pale-skinned, raven-haired teenager who had little faith in God and even less faith in herself.

AKA - She was nothing like me, a dark-skinned Desi Guyanese girl who very much believes in a pantheon of gods and comes with a fairly brazen personality to boot. We were nothing alike, and yet I had written my character as a Snow White look-alike without thinking.

It took me a while before realizing that my main character was written this way due to my own subconscious having preconceived notions about what the fantasy genre looked like. As a writer, I know how to write a fantastical setting and infuse my character with the power of magical elements. I know how to string together a complex plot into something that the reader can connect with, and how to show emotion and depth through my characters. Despite this, my main character was nothing like me or anyone I could relate to, and as such, the whole story suffered for it.

In case you haven’t realized it by now, my point here is that representation matters. It affects both the reader and the writer in an almost cyclical way. The stories we write are always influenced by what we take in from our surroundings, especially the literature we consume. Similarly, the stories we read are based on the experiences our writers are willing to share for the world to see.

My main character was boiled down to a flat version of a Snow White-esque character because I had grown up mostly reading about white girls with Americanized backgrounds and experiences that were hardly similar to my own. For a long time, fantasy literature spotlighted such characters to the point where the main heroines of different fantasy stories almost resembled one another. Taking this a step further, fairytale retellings - the contemporary counterparts to fairytale classics - further perpetuated this stereotype. There just weren’t enough stories in either groups to influence readers and writers into discovering stories outside of the traditional European classics and their predecessors.

Now don’t get me wrong. By no means am I discounting those stories. I LOVE these stories - such as Marissa Meyer’s retelling of the classic princess stories in her Lunar Chronicle Series, AG Howard’s take on “Alice in Wonderland” via their Splintered trilogy, and even Melissa Albert’s Hazelwood - all of which I recommend by the way. However, the stories that I personally connect with, which I recommend above all else, are stories where I could see myself as the main character.

Let’s talk about best-selling Korean-American author Renée Ahdieh for a moment - writer of The Wrath and the Dawn duology. Her story is what I considered to be the antithesis of what someone like me strives for: a story inspired by the Arabic folklore of Scheherezade, in addition, it has elements of “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast”. Talk about a retelling!

I loved everything about this book. The immersion into a fictional world that’s inspired by South Asian culture, the strong will, the beauty behind a dark-skinned Indian character, the references of magic likened to the tales of “Arabian Nights”. It was the perfect fusion of fairytales and South Asian culture all wrapped up into a single story. I loved it and absolutely recommend it to all looking for a healthy dose of multicultural fantasy.

What Adieh wrote inspired me to not only think more intentionally about my writing but also about my reading. It’s so easy to fall back on stories that are similar to the ones from our childhood - the classics. But, in reality, our classics are skewed and reflect only a small fraction of what’s truly out there in the world. It’s up to us to make the conscious effort to try new stories, to build our personal libraries with an electric mix of tales.

I look forward not only to continue to indulge in fantasy and fairytale retellings but also to also challenge myself into reading something that’s completely foreign to me. This is what will help me develop as a better writer, and ultimately as a better person.

Representation matters.

Article edited by Lola Lujan.