jb1111 said:
I can't write African American people well because honestly, I don't know the use of language well enough to make it look honest. With the US's long history of caricatures in entertainment that's the last thing I want to do, is come off like a white guy trying to write something that 'looks black'. Of course, not all African Americans use ebonics, but at the same time enough of them do, and if you are portraying an African American character you want it to appear genuine.
Interesting. I don't write my Black characters in using ebonics automatically. It depends on their background and who they're with which is because I don't use ebonics unless I'm around certain people (family, Black friends). If I'm in mixed company I stick to proper English. Most of my Black characters end up the same way.
C. Gold said:
I've read plenty of romances with POC characters that lacked any cultural flavor. So much so that I forgot they were supposed to be POC. They were basically coffee colored white people. It's probably so readers can project their ideal hero/heroine into the story without many identifiers that would zap them out of the moment.
Personally, I enjoy reading about the cultural specific things that go with a POC.
I have came across this, too. There's a delicate balance between the POC being a caricature and being real, like Asians being intelligent nerds or Black people wearing stylish kicks, sagging their pants, and packing heat.
What I generally do is I start with the main MC and have him deal with some pesky cultural problems along with whatever he's doing otherwise. My last story in particular was about a Romani bisexual man raising a child. Instead of making him the "typical" Romani man, I used his mother, father, sister, ex-girlfriend to explore the facets of his culture without him having to sing and dance for the crowd.
Other times, say, if I'm writing a billionaire romance. My billionaire can be a rich Black man who's not famous from playing sports, but grandma (or great grandma) uses ebonics as a nod to the fact that it's there, but moving around in the world as a successful Black person, sometimes you really kind of present as a "coffee colored" white person.
she-la-ti-da said:
I don't write romance, but my stories often have POC (which is the currently accepted term for people who are not Caucasian -- I'm a member of a group on FB that is mostly AA, and that's the term they use, so I know it's okay). I don't set out to do it, but my muse sends me what he sends me.
It may be harder to sell books with a non-white person on the cover, and it may not be a huge audience, but I see lots of readers who are eager to find books that are about people like them, both in skin color and experience. If you want to hit the biggest audience, at this point you may be better off not having a POC as the main character, but there is a reader out there for other books. It's just a matter of finding them. Give them characters they can relate to, not just differently-colored white people, try to target them in ads, and they will want to read your books.
Yeah, I'm not really concerned with hitting the biggest audience. I've done business for a long time (not writing in particular, but other forms of business) and I've found you can do two things: go for what you know sells and move on or do something unique and hope for the best. I tend to do the latter.
So, in some ways, I write for myself. I've seen the books featuring Black people and if they're written by Black people, they'll portray a lifestyle I'm not into. As in, black woman finds cheating POS boyfriend and wants to go beat up the ex-girlfriend. Everyone's flashy and there's a big messy fight, which isn't my life or how I was raised (ebonics or not). Or they're written by white people as the fetish or the story puts a major focus on the Black person being Black as the majority of the attraction.
Since I was a child, I've wanted to read gay romance featuring POC in a way white people get to read about each other in romance. As in, the POC gets more than being the Black guy from the other side of the tracks or the nerdy Asian or the Hispanic person with a bad temper who speaks half English-half Spanish all the time. I wanted to pick up a book that didn't make the POC the major selling point and go on to read it, just like white people don't go: "Aiden Blake Edwards was a
white guy from the trailer park and Joey Aaron Smith was a rich,
white billionaire".
Like I said before, I keep my covers pretty racially ambiguous and I don't even mention my character's race in the blurb. If someone gets upset halfway through the book because my second MC is Hispanic, well that's really personal. I don't target people looking for multicultural romance in my ad spends because, what do you know, I don't type in "mm BLACK romance" when I go searching for a book.
Yeah, that got long.