Writing Characters Who Aren't You

Let's talk about something sensitive.

There's a question I kept circling back to while writing. Not one that stopped me, but one that sat quietly in the background, waiting to be answered: Do I have the right to tell this story?

My main character is a boy. He's the protagonist of Kingdom: Song of Silence, my fantasy novel in progress. He's in love with his best friend, who is also a boy. And I am neither of those things.

I kept writing anyway, because the story was already moving and Robbie had already shown up with his bedhead and his sparkles and his broken heart. But the question stayed. What if I got it wrong? What if readers who share his experience looked at this character and saw someone who didn't ring true?

I brought this up in my writing workshop, half-expecting a complicated answer.

What I got instead was simple: if this character came to you asking to be written, you have an obligation to see it through.

Women write male characters. Men write female characters. Straight writers write queer characters. Queer writers write straight characters. People who have never experienced war write soldiers. People who have never lost a child write grief. That's what fiction is. You are not your character. Your character is not you. What you owe them is not your identical experience. What you owe them is your honesty, your research, and your willingness to get it wrong and fix it.

That reframe changed something for me. Because the question was never really "do I have the right." The question was "am I willing to do the work to earn it."

So here's what that actually looks like in practice.

Do your research, and don't stop at surface level.

Reading books with similar characters is a start, but it's not enough on its own. Talk to people with lived experience when you can. Follow creators from the community your character belongs to. Read about the specific experiences, pressures, and textures of their world, not the broad version of it that shows up in think pieces.

The goal isn't to collect facts you can sprinkle in. The goal is to understand your character from the inside out so that when you make choices on the page, you're making them from a place of understanding rather than assumption.

Let the character lead. Correct yourself when you follow your assumptions instead.

This is the trickier one. When I catch myself writing Robbie a certain way because of what I think a person in his situation would feel, I've learned to stop and ask: is that what Robbie would feel? Or is that what I'd feel if I were imagining myself into his shoes?

They're different questions. He's not you in a different body. He's himself, with his own specific history and logic and way of moving through the world. Your job is to find that, not import yourself into it.

Get sensitivity readers before you query.

This is non-negotiable. Not because your instincts will definitely be wrong, but because you cannot see your own blind spots. A sensitivity reader from your character's community will catch things you didn't know to catch. Let them. Revise accordingly.

Give yourself permission to be imperfect in the draft.

You cannot write this character perfectly on the first pass. Nobody writes anything perfectly on the first pass. The draft is where you discover who he is. The revision is where you honor that. Holding yourself to a standard of perfection while still drafting is a good way to write nothing at all.

The character showed up. That means something. See it through.

tl;dr: Writing a character unlike yourself isn't about having the same lived experience. It's about doing the work to understand theirs. Research, revision, sensitivity readers, and trusting the character over your assumptions about them. The story chose you. Show up for it.

Questions about writing across difference? Drop them below.