Writers: What is your ethnicity and how has it influenced your story?

I and my MC are Americans. I'm an American human. He is an American teddy bear. There are over 10000 beings in the story - three humans, and the rest are stuffed animals.

Of the main and secondary characters, there are seven teddy bears, two dogs, a rabbit, two mice and a Phillies Phanatic--all stuffed animals.

The humans include one bus driver, one 10 year old girl, and one 14 year old boy. I made sure no one could distinctively determine their ethnicity other than "Americans."

I like readers to imagine whatever they want to imagine for looks.

I'm an American with predominantly Polish and Italian heritage (then there's Irish and English. German's in there somewhere too). To be honest, I don't know much about my heritage other than that XD In my stories though, Polish, Italian, English, American - or whatever - doesn't exist. Technically, I'm coming up with my own ethnicities because I have my invented world :P But most of the characters are basically white. And I don't tell the reader this outright, but pale skin originates in one region. The regions have over time mixed, so people don't conclude you're this or that based on if you're pale or not. But the story does hint a lot that the people have mixed, which connects to the story's theme.

There's a darker skin population which represents people who populated the world first. I don't directly tell the reader this either, yet 'tis important xD I like the idea of including different ethnicities with different customs and origins. I like the fact that I'm so mixed myself - I like learning about my background, but I don't know enough, for example, to write a solid Italian character. Besides, creating my own ethnicities is much more fun anyway. And some of the stuff I do know about my ancestors has lent a little to what I create. I think incorporating ethnicities and customs of any kinds can definitely help a story. Especially with a fantasy world/place, where you've never actually visited or heard of. It helps with the realistic aspect a bit. It can also help with the story's themes, as it's helping mine :D

Ethnically I'm Eurasian (Caucasian mother and Asian father), however I am British by Nationality (although raised in the Canary Islands, where people speak Spanish yet the islands are near South Africa). Personally, I don't really think that my ethnicity has influenced my writing, but there's possibly a whole lot about my myself that I don't realise because 'I am me', and I cannot perceived myself any other way. If I grew up in another country my writing would probably be different, or if I had a different upbringing than I did - but based on my ethnicity? I don't know, maybe.

A lot of my stories are set in fantasy worlds, however my MC is ethnically Caucasian. My other characters? Most of them (the humans at least) are Caucasian, however I do have a few East Asian and African American characters who are 'major characters', and I try to have as many different cultures in my stories to make it as diverse as I can. But again, I write a lot of fantasy stuff, so as well as real life cultures that influence my fantasy world, I also have quite a few made up cultures :P

21 y/o white American girl. My characters vary. In Western literature, a character is white unless otherwise specified. This applies to my writing, I suppose, though I do make a point, where it matters, to address diversity. My WOP occupies a world biologically identical to ours. The only difference is the geography and the people. All cultures and languages are products of my mind, inspired by my observations, readings, and travel. I read into various Inuit cultures to learn how my MC and his people would survive in the enviroment I had made available. On a single island, there are three native ethnic groups, one of which is extinguished by the imperialists. The eastern-island is colonized for stragetic purposes. The foreigners come from an environment of abundance: their culture is a hodgepodge of European and Oriental influences. Their ethnicity is imaginary.

I've always had an interest in other cultures. As young as six, I was making lists of words in other languages and their meanings, memorizing them. My vocabulary sprung from books, videogames, multilingual signs, shampoo bottles, and instruction manuals. Now I'm studying comparative literature, which covers everything but American and British literature. I know some Spanish and am learning German. I would say, my interest in other cultures has influenced the ethnicity of my characters more than my own ethnicity. Honestly, I'm not an "ethnic" anything. German, Polish, English, Bohemian...Spanish? Wherever I went in Europe, I blended in. I'm an ethnic chameleon. Perhaps that's why I enjoy taking on the POV of someone who is better defined than me.

Being white has made me more aware of my characters' ethnicity in the sense that not every body is white. I write high fantasy and it's very, very easy to make much of the realm the same colour as you, since your colour is what you're most comfortable with and what you're able to relate to more.

Due to the geography of my world, not every person my characters meet is white. However, in the original drafts, there were very few people of colour even though they travel around the world. This was only an issue I noticed when I checked on readers' thoughts on Youtube. One such Youtuber (who's black) describes that "white is default until specified otherwise", that "minority characters are sidelined, etc, in high fantasy" and that "because readers are used to seeing a white character, they say it's historically accurate EVEN IN A FANTASY WORLD to have most characters or even the MC black, brown, etc". She and the other Youtubers thrust me into a mindset where I had to be very aware of the ethnicity of my characters to make the story and setting realistic, and also to create a pluralistic story where minority characters especially aren't dumbed down to cliches or sidelined.

As such, four of my characters are white, five I imagine to look Asian, a handful are black and the rest look Middle Eastern. One or two are mixed race. One of my MCs looks white and the other two look Asian and Middle Eastern.

I hate token, sidelined and cliched minority characters. I hate minority characters who "act white" (the Youtuber I mainly talked about spoke of how much black culture is important to a black person, which is why I now often express culture is very important to a character's identity). I also think there should be more diversity if the setting demands it.

I'm British-Asian, but actually I don't feel any links to my Asian side and I feel wholly British. I've grown up with British norms all my life. I'm not religious, despite some of my family being. A skin colour is just a skin colour to me. I have brown skin but I feel white.

I understand that it also has a wider context in that it can tell you where a character is from, and how this has influenced them, but I'd be careful to avoid stereotypes that make the culture and background of a character seem unrealistic.

I'd say about just over half of my characters are white, but this isn't a conscious thing I do when I make up characters.

This is a really in depth question. I want to edit this later and write more on the subject.

To start off, my characters and I are American.

My ethnicity, however, is Mexican/Puerto Rican.

It used to effect my writing more when I was 12/13 because I wanted to be proud of my heritage. I felt like every protagonist and every hero was a white man and I figured that if nobody catered to me, I would create my own hero to show that a brown hero is just as good as a white one haha.

I'm 17 now and I have a greater diversity in my writing. My main character is white. I don't purposely make people white, black or brown. I think of a trait like "oh maybe my character has curly hair" and i'll just get an image of an entire character with curly hair. Then I base their ethnicity of what my mental image of them is.

So my MC is white, german/english ancestry, my other major characters are white ( I havent specified of what descent yet), greek american, and african american

I never write about a specific ethnicity, perhaps because mine varies so significantly. I usually leave it out and let the reader decide for themselves. What I visualize though is usually Caucasian. I don't go in depth with physical descriptions of minor characters or relatively large characters. My MC is described, but not by skin color. For example, J.A, my MC. All I say about him in that he has black hair and deep blue eyes, people can fill in the rest.

I'm an american caucasian male but for the record it doesn't matter I've got people from all sorts of races. Mostly the ones that fit into my fantasy world. There are black people, asian people, Irish people etc. Growing up in a place where life is full of different races has influenced my story greatly and traveling to places where I've seen all different races has also inspired me. I don't really think being white has any influence on my writing it's being in the mix that influences my writing.

I'm Chechen and Romani, and I often have characters who reflect my cultural background, but I try not to let it influence me too much. I write mostly fantasy, and I am very interested in foreign cultures and languages, so I'll often have characters who are from many different ethnicities. In the book I'm writing now, the cultures of my world are based on real world cultures. My three main characters are my world's equivalents of Finnish, Roman, and Bedouin.

I believe that the ethnicity of a character is extremely important. I can't stand it when authors leave the race or ethnicity of their main character ambiguous because that usually just means that they're white. A person's culture is a huge part of their life. It often dictates which morals they were raised with, what their religious beliefs are, how they interact with the opposite gender, etc. It's like leaving the character's gender ambiguous. Unless the character is unimportant to the story, the reader should know every aspect of them, including their race.

I also believe that today's literature should be far more diverse. There's a certain idea among white authors that it's impossible for someone to write from the perspective of a character that is a different race than the author. This idea is ridiculous. Just as a woman can write from the perspective of a man and vice versa, a white author can write from the perspective of a black character. It's not as big of a deal as everyone makes it out to be. Authors should be populating their worlds with wide, diverse casts. In the high school I went to, there were Indians and Pakistanis and Bosnians and Japanese.. There were people from all over the world, not just a bunch of pretty white people. America is amazingly diverse, and our fiction should reflect that.

I have also noticed a disturbing trend arising in YA literature. It goes something like this: pretty, rich white girl moves from America to "strange" foreign land (Japan, India, Hawaii). At first she hates it because she's just so pretty and rich and white and she doesn't fit in at all with all these weird brown people and their odd ways. But then, somehow, she gets involved in some ancient curse/ritual/insert lazily researched mythological occurrence here. Oh, and she meets a hot local guy, too! This trend is horrible. It is as repulsive as a white guy playing the last samurai or a white guy becoming the bestest Native American warrior ever. There are already people living in these "strange" foreign lands. Why not tell their stories? Why do you have to shove a pretty, rich white girl into some setting where she doesn't belong? Is she really just that much more interesting than the beautiful brown-skinned Hawaiian girl who already lives there? Like I said, it's okay to write from the perspective of someone who is not the same race as you. If you do your research on the culture and how they interact in their societies, then you are good to go.

I am African. When I was around 12 and 13, all my characters were Black. But then, I started reading A LOT of American books and watching American movies. I guess that influenced me a great deal, so I didn't even realize when I started referring to my characters including my MC as White. Though now, I plan on changing that, at least some of my characters are going to be black or mixed.

I love African books, they are really enjoyable. It's just that I got stuck on American books because I used to like the ghost stories then.