Ultimately, this gets back to the foundations of why we as a human race tell stories. We want to communicate ideas, spread knowledge, share secrets, engage with our contemporaries, entertain, inspire, call to action, and move people. Sure, you can do most of those things without telling a story, but stories are powerful because they connect with people on an emotional level. In order to make this connection, people have to relate to the story and feel like it’s their story, like they are a part of it and it was made for them. They have to see themselves or a version of themselves in the story so that it speaks to them personally as well as to the universal emotions in all of us. If some are singled out or left out, stories lose a bit of their power—or a lot of it.
With all the ideologically and emotionally charged politics at the forefront of social discourse right now, it’s easy to think diversity in stories (or in anything) is about being politically correct and trying not to offend certain groups of people we want to support our work. As creators, of course we find this daunting because we generally want as many people as possible to like our work. However, we can also feel strongly that it’s our right to choose how we tell our own stories without undue influence from politically charged fandoms, activism, or whoever’s yelling their opinion the loudest. But this type of thinking is entirely missing the point.
Diversity in storytelling isn’t about making everyone happy or trying to pass some arbitrary standard like the Bechdel Test, the Mako Mori Test, nor the LGBT Fans Deserve Better pledge. We should certainly pay attention to them, but they exist to make a point about the current state of our storytelling more so than to become golden standards that magically qualify a story as “diverse” or “feminist.”
Diversity is important because it builds trust in your readers. As Steve Almond put it, “All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.” But this trust is all too easily broken. Yes, fiction is by nature fantasy, but it must be believed to have any impact at all. Fiction is a lie that tells the truth.
If we perpetuate a falsehood in our fiction that is so obviously spotted and easily scrutinized as the pandemic under-representation and misrepresentation of real people in our society, we break this trust and people no longer come to our stories as willing accomplices to our lies. The goodwill contract is broken. When this becomes the rule rather than the exception in the stories of our society, it impacts the economy of stories as a whole. Storytelling itself can begin to lose its power due to this widespread skepticism and mistrust.
We are at the point now where the blatant disregard for diversity and the true representation of our audience has begun to poison our opinion of storytellers and the stories themselves. That’s why now, more than ever, diversity is something we can’t take lightly. We need to pay attention, judge for ourselves what we believe is a fair representation of the audiences we are trying to engage with, and tell the truth in our stories.
---
Just in case there's any confusion or this didn't come through clearly enough: I don't think it's the diversity of a character that makes them relatable or fascinating; I'm saying relatable and fascinating characters deserve to be diverse.
If we can't write about diverse characters who are relatable and fascinating, maybe we as writers aren't doing a good enough job of understanding the complexity of the people around us. I'm simply suggesting that we as creators should challenge ourselves to tell universally true stories about all people. This means stopping to consider the lives and truths of others so we don't under-represent or completely misrepresenting other people in our stories and thus lose the trust of our audience.
