On Writing Characters Who Don't Look Like Me… and Ones Who Do

One of the biggest challenges I faced when writing The Foothills was: how do I keep six voices distinct?

It’s a great question. There are six characters, and they each get one section; each perspective is given exactly one shot. There’s no return, no revisits and no second pass. The story only continues from the perspective of the next character.

The more honest question, the one I asked myself constantly while writing, was different: do I have the right to be inside all of these people?

Let me start with the ones who have money.

Some of my characters come from the kind of wealth that doesn’t announce itself because it genuinely never has to: old money. The kind where the question “can we afford this?” was never part of any sentence anyone in the family has uttered, ever.

I have never lived this. I have no idea what that feels like. I don’t think I’ve even observed it in real life! I’ve read about it, of course, and seen it in media in various forms. But that’s not the same thing.

Writing them required something I can only describe as disciplined imagination. I had to resist making these characters punchlines. Rich kids can be very easy to mock, even sometimes flatten into symbols of everything wrong with “equality” and “inequality”, which can be satisfying if you’re trying to buck the status quo or start a debate. But that wasn’t my goal. Real people who grow up wealthy are not cartoon villains; they are people who have been accustomed to life with little friction and consequence. And what was creative fun was thinking about what they’re actually made of when things get hard. Or when they don’t get something they want.

I got some things wrong in early drafts, for sure. The easiest misstep was writing at a character instead of from them. The process of fixing those moments was humbling in the best way. It reminded me that the work of imagining across differences is never finished, always a learning process. And ultimately, it wasn’t about focusing on those differences, but rather highlighting the similarities. How we’re actually more alike than we think, once everything else is stripped away.

That felt more interesting to write. It also felt more honest.

Now. The characters who are male.

I have to be real with you about this one. This was incredibly tough. Not because men are necessarily mysterious creatures beyond my comprehension (though, maybe). I know a lot of males, I went to school with them, I’ve argued with them, I am married to one, and I have two small ones… so I do understand the general vibe. But writing from inside a male perspective turned out to require a level of imaginative commitment that I underestimated.

I briefly considered asking some random guys at the gym a few questions to get their general reaction to different situations. I had a document at one point called "do men actually think this." It had a lot of entries, and I consulted a few trusted men in my life who were good sports about it. I rewrote those chapters more than any others, especially the dialogue and inner monologue.

I think I got close. I'm saying that with the full awareness that "I think" is doing some work in that sentence. I’m still not sure if the male characters are truly reflective of how a male would behave/act/speak, or if they are just male characters crafted by a female writer. And honestly, I don’t know if it matters. But hopefully I did capture a bit of that truth.

Now, writing the characters who do look like me.

This is where it got both easier and harder.

As an AAPI writer, I came to these characters with a very specific kind of fluency, what I think of as the grammar of performed okayness. There is a particular silence that lives in a lot of AAPI families. Not the absence of feeling, but the disciplined management of its expression. You are fine. Things are fine. We don't discuss the ways in which things are not fine because giving them external weight can give others the wrong impression of you and your family.

If you’re not in it, it’s hard to understand it. But the best example I can give is Mulan. She is told to bring honor to her family, or that certain actions would not bring honor to her family. And in an “over-generalization” kind of way, I’ve always felt that sums it up. For me, as a first-generation Chinese American, the underlying expectation was that we represent our family, and what we do is reflective of our family’s identity. So everything we do and say, even the way we dress, is driven by that.

The challenge was writing it in a way that didn't require a footnote. If you over-explain it, you kill it. It then becomes more of a sociological observation instead of a lived thing. Under-explain it and only the readers who already know it will recognize it, which means you've written for a specific group and abandoned everyone else.

The answer, imperfect and ongoing, was specificity. Not "she felt the weight of her family's expectations", because that could mean anything. It was more nuanced in ways, how she reacts to different situations. Or the thing she says out loud versus the thing that she debates in her head for days. And while I am writing with an AAPI voice, the beauty of this particular story’s journey is that we are all more alike than we think. We all struggle with family expectations, unspoken desires, and the embarrassment of choosing the wrong path or making a mistake.

That's what I love about fiction at its best. It doesn't let you stay comfortably inside your own experience. It asks you to go somewhere else, and then, if you've done it right, it sends you home changed.

The Foothills is available on Amazon.

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Phyllis Mma is a former digital marketing professional and recovering licensed attorney based in Minnesota. The Foothills is her debut novel.