Balancing Backlog: When the Well Overflows

Let's talk about balancing ideas and projects. I can't think of a single writer I know who doesn't have ideas that float around in their head to wake them up or keep them up at night -- and typically ideas not related to the current WIP. Oh, what's a poor writer to do?

Are you the type of writer who has a massive backlog of ideas to explore in your stories or the type who deals with one idea at a time and then turns on the idea machine afterward? How do store that backlog, whether digital or on paper?

Marian Allen: I have so many projects already in the pipeline, I don't have the brain capacity to do anything with new ones. EXCEPT! I do Story A Day May every year, and those flashes of ideas are great to prompt daily stories. I also have a big folder with story ideas in it, and, in the rare times when I need something to write, I dig into that. I've used it for many stories.

Jay Requard: Massive backlog. It is currently all in notebooks but I'm transcribing one part to digital after the baby got a hold of it.

Elizabeth Donald: Ideas are fleeting little butterflies that need to be captured in jars before they get away. I keep a folder on my computer titled “Marinade” where I put the stray ideas. They have to sit there and think about what they’ve done, and when I need help I go for a walk through the folder. My first novel is in there, in all its drafts going back to the utterly dreadful high school novella, and there are reasons why it’s never seen the light of day. The next oldest file in there is from 2002 and may not actually be translatable now, but why would I let it get away? If I’m not near my computer when an idea strikes, I will use voice-to-text to stick it in my phone until I can translate it to my Marinade file. If I tried to keep it on paper, I would inevitably lose it, and there goes my Pulitzer.

Bobby Nash: Depends on your idea of massive. There are many ideas tucked away for future use. Some I will never get to, I suspect as new ideas keep working their way into my brain. One of the best things about having these ideas sitting in writer limbo is that sometimes, I realize that two of them are part of the same story and blend them together.

Nikki Nelson-Hicks: I have a backlog of ideas. All of them swarming around in my brain. I keep them in journals or post-it notes that I have stuck all around my desk top. What percentage actually gets done? I don't know, man. if I start keeping score, I'll just get constipated and never do another damn thing. I just keep trucking. If the idea is good enough, it'll last until it's time to get inked.

B. Clay Moore: I have a huge backlog of ideas, and now and then one pops back into my head to either inform a new idea or as the impetus to rework it in a new direction.

John French: I have a legal pad on my desk, with separate pages for each "project". On these pages, I write notes, story and character ideas, etc. Right now I'm about 10-15K away from finishing one with five more warming up in the bullpen waiting to get the call.

Good ol' fashioned notepad.

Ef Deal: When I started writing, I had a character arc that consumed me, and I'm not through with her yet after 35 years. In those pre-computer days, I filled blank books and spiral notebooks and steno pads. I just kept writing. I couldn't stop. She's a rich mine of stories. I've written a lot of flash pieces and other short stories in the meantime, but I keep coming back to her and that universe. I really hope she sees print one day because she's a fantastic badass. When I started this new series The Twins of Bellesfées, I found myself picturing the twins in so many steampunk / paranormal crossover situations I couldn't stop writing. The more I researched the more ideas for novels I got. 

Michael Dean Jackson: Oh, hells, yeah! I have a Word document listing a dream schedule of almost 20 projects, only half a dozen of which have been completed. I have worked on a few of them off and on, I have sketched thumbnails of potential book covers. They're all there in my mind floating around. Every once in a while I grab one and wrestle it to completion (but not as often as I'd like! The Dream Schedule is seeming more and more like a dream the longer it takes to actually get them to completion.)

My unwritten ideas sometimes seem more attractive than the one I'm working on, but they usually behave.

HC Playa: I feel like maybe I'm weird 😂. I hyperfocus on a WIP...maybe. I literally avoid going into that musing headspace of new ideas until I have a rough draft down for whatever I am working on. I don't mind at all doing edits on one while creating another.

Ernest Russell: In my story ideas folder there are 35-40 ideas, from a couple of sentences to a pitch to an outline because I really want to recall where I was going with it. The journal I carry with me has story ideas, notes on current projects, notes from panels and lectures, turn of phrase I heard/saw that I liked. No sketches though, my stick people look sick and trees look more like cotton swabs.

Jonathan Sweet: Definitely a massive backlog. I've done a better job lately of storing them -- I keep a running file on my phone so I can get them down when I think of them. (I tend to find they come up when I'm off doing something else, so my previous goal of "I'll remember them when I get back to my desk" never seemed to work.)

How big a distraction do your unwritten ideas become when you are on another project? How do you balance their demands with those of the primary stories?

Teel James Glenn: I'm pretty good at controlling the 'I've gotta do this' with "I owe this to a publisher'-- the hardest is that I need to have short story 'space' between novels' so they can circulate while the months of working on the next novel...

Ernest Russell: Jot it down. If I can't seem to let go, I'll write a synopsis or an outline to revisit. Then back into the current projects. When I finish a project, if there is nothing pressing, I'll look through the ideas and dust one off.

Starting to get out of hand, huh?

Spencer Moore: I have no “process.” But I have like, a zillion different narrative bits that I’m always fooling with in my head, like an 800-pound Rubic's Cube with about a million different sides… Seriously, I’m locked and loaded for whenever the money guys come a’knockin’.

B. Clay Moore: My last Aftershock book, Miles To Go, combined two different ideas I'd had around forever, and *also* included a scene I'd written 15 years ago for a graphic novel I never finished, based on a real experience.

Jay Requard: I outline my ideas if they have any real pull with me, so once that outline is filed away I go about what I'm working on which is usually 1-2 manuscripts and an editorial project but I'm actually reading again for. Part of the hard answer to your question that might rankle people is psychological: why would an idea bother me when it's the next thing I can do? If you have this idea in your head that there is no real rest in this *life* as an author, then you finish one project and immediately go on to the next. Having that backlog keeps the work going and the chance of making it continue.

Timothy Joe Kirk: Middling, sometimes I've got to make a note right now but can write it and go back.

Jonathan Sweet: They can be a distraction when the writing isn’t going well on my current project. They’re that bright shiny object over there … I try to balance the demands by jotting down notes as those story points come to me and then jumping back over to the current project

Bobby Nash: When something new hits, I jot down some notes to return to later. If it's an idea related to one of the projects in some form of production, I go ahead and start writing it down. Yesterday, oddly enough, I wrote a chapter for the 3rd Sheriff Myers book, which I technically haven't started writing yet. The chapter was so vivid in my mind I went ahead and wrote it. Unusual for me as I don't generally write my first draft out of order, but I knew if I didn't, I would forget it. Or, at least part of it.

Elizabeth Donald: My ideas are never a distraction. Unfortunately, sometimes they grow into fully-fledged stories with plots and twists and characters and all those lovely nuances just waiting for me to hamhandedly put them on the screen. When they reach maturity but I don’t have time to write them, it gets annoying. I was just telling a colleague last week that I have Novel A at the nine-tenths mark with a publisher waiting, Novel B plotted but not written, Collection A half-written and Collection B at the one-quarter mark, and all of these are potentially paying projects, plus a burgeoning master’s thesis. So what’s occupying my mind when I’m two minutes from falling sleep? Novel C, which no one wants and isn’t on anyone’s schedule. Stop it, Novel C! Wait your turn!

Let's be honest, what percentage of your ideas, at least those interesting enough to record for "one day," ever really make it to the forefront of your brain and get worked on as potential stories? How do you prioritize what becomes a valid new project versus what must remain in the "not yet" pile in your inventory of ideas?

Michael Dean Jackson: Honestly, I don't know how many of the dream projects will ever see the light of day. On a good day, I'd say maybe half, but realistically I'd have to say four...maybe five... and only because I have actually taken a stab at writing those

Ef Deal: My head is full of stories all the time, but they don't interfere with my writing. If I get stuck on a piece, I turn to another idea for a bit. Then I see an anthology opening, and five new ideas pop into my head, and I write them.

What do I work on next?

Roger Stegman: From 1997 to 2006, I had more ideas than I could write, so I posted them on bulletin boards. I posted at least an idea a day, and most years I posted from 50 to 400 extra ideas a year. Going through some at one time or another, one or two a month were really good. Most were drivel, but I never knew that until long after it was posted.

Jonathan Sweet: A pretty small percentage. The ideas keep coming because that’s the easy part for me. The unused story idea is the wonderful, perfect, unspoiled nugget. Sitting down and cranking out the stories are always more of a challenge. I’ve accepted that a lot of these ideas will never make it to full story form.

HC Playa: I don't really have extensive notes. I might scribble an outline, some brainstorming plot, and conflict ideas, but I tend to keep it all in my head until I build a world that is too complex. Sometimes I'll get a story started, run into a plot issue and set it aside, but that's the extent of my "idea" log.

Ernest Russell: To date, I've had three accepted and are awaiting publishing. There are perhaps half a dozen with progress made on them. Currently, I have nothing on a deadline. I've been working in collaboration on a novel, I have a sequel to a novella started, and an ongoing story a friend and I share just for the fun of it. Once the first draft of the novel is completed I have a collection I've worked on here and there, I want to concentrate on it. It's the furthest along of my different WIPs. It has the benefit that I already know there is interest in it. Beyond that, Whichever one strikes my interest. When it does, magic happens. Sometimes, nothing happens.

Bobby Nash: I don't know numbers, but there are germs of ideas that will probably never go beyond that unless another idea comes along that adds to that idea. Ideas are always flying at me, but there's more to a good story than just an idea. Sometimes, you have to wait for the right idea and character to meet.

Elizabeth Donald: I’d say maybe 30 percent of my ideas eventually come to fruition, but they may linger in the Marinade file for years. One concept went through five iterations before it morphed into the project that I sold. And really, that last part is what’s key to which ideas become a valid new project and which ideas go to the back of the line. Harlan Ellison once asked me how many stories I had sold, and I flubbed the question because Harlan made me nervous. But it occurred to me later that he didn’t ask how many ideas I’d had, or even how many stories I’d finished to my satisfaction. He asked me how many I had sold. Because when you do this for a living, that’s how you pay the rent. I’ve been told that perhaps I focus too much on the salability of a project, perhaps to the detriment of the art. That’s possibly true, but there’s also a lot of privilege to the idea that we should do art first and market second. When you have the rent paid by other means, maybe you can do art first. But when you feed your family by the written word, you need to prioritize what you can sell and keep your work out where the eyeballs can find it. So call me a craven commercialist, but buy enough of my books so I can go write Novel C, would you? That book won’t shut up.

B. Clay Moore: Just had a new book approved with a publisher, and should be outlining it while waiting on the contract, but another old idea that I'd partially developed with an artist a decade ago jumped up and bit me, and I'm now polishing that to pitch. 

If an idea is good but doesn't fly, I always keep it in the back of my busy brain.

My organization is more like "dis-"

Jay Requard: I would refer to the answer in my second question, but basically if it sticks with me for a bit I finally get to writing it down in an outline. I do have outlines I will never touch in that notebook, but I also sold three stories last year from something I wrote two years ago in it. I'm also proud to say I've completed a number of them as well.

Timothy Joe Kirk: Quite a few, sometimes I find a better way to approach the idea later.

Matt Hiebert: Three novel-length ideas in the background. If I start something I have to finish… at least a first draft. I plan to finish at least two of the novels.

Thank You, Captain Planet -- Writers Respond to Politically Correct Character Casting

When I first heard the politically correct combining of various races and genders in a preset, paint-by-numbers exercise as "Captain Planet" casting, I nearly snorted Diet Coke onto the shoulders of the con-goer sitting in front of me.

I always hated Captain Planet as a kid, perhaps for that very reason. It seemed so... forced.

But rather than assuming I speak for every writer, I took the hard questions to a group of authors who know all about these things.

What responsibility (if any) does an author have for portraying a variety of cultures/races/genders in a given work?

Michael Baron: The first responsibility is to entertain. A good writer uses his imagination to put himself into the heads of many people. I use whatever characters are appropriate to the story. Anyone who reads my fiction knows I incorporate many diverse types. But not for the sake of diversity. For the sake verisimilitude.

Chuck Dixon: A writer has no responsibility to anyone about anything.

Adam L. Garcia: I believe the author responsibility is to tell a good story and should focus on that first, but should do so in a way that treats the characters equally, regardless of race/gender/culture.

Beau Smith: Writing a compelling story with characters that have something to say, Likability is a key that so many times goes neglected. Without an emotional investment, readers won't care about the situation, or the conflict.

Gordon Dymowski: Let's be absolutely clear – we live in a multicultural world. An author has an absolute responsibility to portray a variety of cultures, races, and genders within a story. Cliched complaints like being "politically correct" or "being inclusive" are merely forms of intellectual laziness, substituting catchphrases for honest, open dialogue. And for those who think that a writer should reflect their reader's politics, sorry people - writers don't serve any political agenda but their own.

Crafting a diverse range of characters even in a traditional pulp milieu can be done...and it actually has been done within New Pulp. Barry Reese's Lazarus Gray stories are an excellent example:  one of the characters is a gay person of color, and Barry's writing imbues the character with dignity and honesty while acknowledging that the time in which those stories takes place was not welcoming of diversity. (And let's not forget Black Pulp and Asian Pulp from Pro Se Productions) So yes, a writer should work hard to be as multicultural as possible within the context of their story and setting.

John Morgan 'Bat' Neal:Well it doesn’t hurt to be mindful of it but it also isn’t something you want to force.  Like many things it should organic to what you are writing.  Many things have a reason to have the people populating the story that is being told.   But it can work to toss in something that contrasts with the commonality of the people and places that are the main part of the story.  Take Dracula for example.  Stoker told a timeless tale of an invading alien coming into a set society. Dracula was as different from the main English characters as he could be.  But he at least shared that uniquely European notion of nobility.  Stoker could have stopped there but he also added Quincey Morris.  A tall Texan.  A character that provided further contrast and relief and helped make the novel one of the best of all time.   So it pays to throw in a bit of spice.  That spice can come from different races, cultures, sexes, and sexual orientations.    In summation, I think the main responsibility of a writer is to write something good and entertaining.  Once that is achieved they can see about being socially responsible. 
 
Anna Grace Carpenter: I have a responsibility to write a convincing story that feels real, even when it's not. Different stories will involve different elements to feel "real", but lack of diversity has more and more taken on an aspect of unreality for me. (It was less so when I was younger and in a more limited social setting. As an adult I interact with all types of folks on a regular basis and recognize that is more the reality of most of the world.)

B. Clay Moore: Unless directly commissioned to address specific cultural, gender-related, or racially relevant themes, a writer's responsibility is to be true to himself (or herself), period. He has no "responsibility" to please anyone, or not to offend anyone. Once the work exists, it's open to whatever interpretation people want to lend it, and the author is open to whatever criticism may come. But there is no "responsibility" to anything beyond the story.

Logan Masterson: The writer bears whatever responsibility he or she accepts. We can write silly stories and sad stories and meaningful stories.

I choose to write what I hope is meaningful fiction. It's not all inclusive. Ravencroft Springs is about a white guy. But Canticle of Ordrass: Wheel of the Year is about a girl fleeing religious persecution only to confront racism and ignorance. All the MCs are women. It's a challenge for me to write, which is one of the better things about it, and I think it makes me better.

As makers of art, we are the front line in the culture war. Stories like ours become films. They become TV shows and graphic novels. They enter the zeitgeist.Our stories can change peoples' minds, and the world itself, if only in tiny ways. But we're all tiny, and pebbles make ripples.

Ultimately, are you obligated to be inclusive and exploratory in your work? No, but I am.

Lance Stahlberg: Responsibility? None. The author's job is to tell a story. It's not our job to appeal to the sensibilities of every possible reader. That way lies madness. You can't win with the politically correct. Don't even try.

Now, if you're trying to be realistic, then you are going to want to portray the variety of races that a reader would expect to find in your setting. If you're in a modern day major city, it might be weird if you don't run across any blacks or hispanics with a speaking role. Unless your plot takes place entirely within the Irish mob. Or a small Midwestern town. Then a random non-white character might feel like a token.

If you try to force something in, it will feel forced and your reader will be jarred out of the story. So the bottom line when it comes to ethnicity, IMHO, is be representative of your setting, but don't feel obligated.

Gender is a little different. Women are no longer relegated to damsels in distress or love interests. If you have a big cast of characters, but don't have any females outside of those two roles, readers will notice.

The Bechdel Test isn't half bad as a guide. But again, don't feel obligated. If your plot plot does not allow for the occasion for two female characters to meet, don't make them. Don't force anything into your work just to appease a reviewer at jezebel.com. Same as above, trying to make the politically correct happy is not your job. Telling a story that feels real and engages your target audience is.

Percival Constantine: It depends on the setting. I'm planning a series set in modern Japan which is very homogenous. So there won't be a lot of multiculturalism in that book. But if I'm writing something in Chicago, only having white guys would be unrealistic.

Ron Earl Phillips: As has been said, you shouldn't ever write to appease some cultural ideal. It is your world you are building, and so the situations are yours to create. But if your story is set in a specific reality, then it has to adhere to those rules set in that reality.

Robert Krog: I was never a fan of Captain Planet either for precisely the reason that it was so forced.  I don’t believe that a writer has any set obligation to meet quotas of that sort or even to write stories addressing such issues.  That being said, great works of literature that persist and are retold over many generations do address socially relevant issues such as equality, tolerance, and love of humanity.  I do believe that stories should tell the truth in as much as the writer knows the truth. I don’t mean the facts, necessarily, but the truth.  The truth is that people come in two sexes and from many cultures and ethnic backgrounds.  It’s bound to come up some time.  So have at it, but don’t force it. 

Also, be careful about being preachy.  It’s one thing to have a preachy character.  Those people exist.  It’s another to break readers out of the story by being a preachy author.  Sermons and stories are hard to weave together convincingly.  That is to say, it’s fairly easy to work a story into a sermon or a sermon into a story, but it’s also easy to confuse the two completely and lose either or both.  Most readers, these days, I think, do not want a story to turn into a sermon.  Some do, I suppose.  Most, I think, do not.  I’d avoid it.

What advice do you have for building an ensemble cast without resorting to a paint by numbers, politically correct cliche? 

Gordon Dymowski: The greatest lesson I learned in writing the “other” came from graduate school, when I was learning to be a counselor. One key  idea was that some counselors tend to stereotype certain groups by symptoms and/or beliefs (like “Asian-Americans are less likely to be alcoholic” or “Hispanic men rely on machismo), rather than seeing how specific cultures affect them. (It's also key to realize that there's no such thing as “Asian” or “Hispanic” culture – there's Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Mexican, Puerto Rican….in short, it's about learning the intricacies of each culture and reflecting those differences). Same with gender/sexuality - learning about the nuances and other's experiences allows me to be more empathetic towards them, and portray them as human beings first and traits later.

When I write a person of color (or gender/sexuality/other characteristic that is not me), I really try to understand that person emotionally, and how their culture affected them. When I was writing “When Angels Fall” for DREAMERS SYNDROME: NEW WORLD NAVIGATION, Jessica (the female lead) was originally a faded Southern beauty queen, chock full of the usual cliches and stereotypes. (In other words, the story sucked because of that poor writing). Remembering past work with local quinceanera shops in my neighborhood, I decided that might be a great way to make the character interesting, and that a cultural influence might strengthen Jessica's character. Integrating that aspect made Jessicar a more interesting character to write, granting her added dimensions which I hadn't considered when thinking about her.

(It also helps me as an author to step outside my comfort zone, and experience other cultures while learning about different groups of people. Actually realize that when you're writing a person of a different gender/sexuality/race, you're writing a person/character first who happens to be influenced by their experiences/culture. Writing stereotypes or falling on the typical cliched tropes hurts both the writers and the writing. As that same grad school professor once advised, eating at Taco Bell does not count as “engaging in Mexican culture.” 

Percival Constantine: Start with character. Always with character. I think about actors and actresses who would fit my characters so that can help.

Ron Earl Phillips: I write stories set in rural America. Very homogeneous, and often times starkly black and/or white. And depending on how I want to serve the story, the use of outsiders would be distracting unless it were a stranger in a strange land type story. Serve the story first, then yourself, and then the reader.

Lance Stahlberg: Sean cited Captain Planet as an example of a paint by numbers cast. That is a great illustration of how putting the message first kills your story. That painfully lame cartoon never even attempted to be entertaining. It was only trying to push an agenda.

The example I always think of is Power Rangers. I mean, the white girl was pink, the Asian girl was yellow (!!!), and the black guy was in the black costume. Really??

In your writing, especially pulp writing, the story is king. So if you have, say, a Muslim character thrown in whose only apparent purpose is to be Muslim, your story sucks. If the fact that they are Muslim works within the framework of your story and is part of what makes them interesting, that's one thing. But if you do it just so you can puff out your chest and announce how diverse your cast is, you are not doing your story, your readers, or the Muslim community any favors.

Really, my advice is to just not overthink it. If your story calls for an culturally diverse cast, go for it. If you find that your lineup needs more variety to the point where you are afraid your readers will get them confused because they all look and sound alike, then yeah, it makes sense. But the minute you say "this story needs a _________", walk away from the keyboard and take a deep breath. It's your story, not the PC police's.

John Morgan 'Bat' Neal: Just be mindful of it.  If you can’t see that you are being cliché or PC then perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to make an ensemble cast and go with what you know until you can see it.  But I think most if not all can if they try harder.  The best advice I can give is make the character.  And then see who they are, and usually that will lead to different races, cultures and orientations if that is what and who they are.  When I created the PostModern Pioneers I did not set out to make them all what they ended up being.  That came as they were being former.  “Bird” Portamayne for instance could have easily been White or Hispanic or whatever.  But as I was writing him it was clear to me he was a middle aged black man. 

And sometimes avoiding clichés is just as bad as pushing them.  Because sometimes clichés are based in a reality.  The character of “Granny” Roh is an Asian computer whiz. That is as cliché is cliché can get these days.  But it just never occurred to me to avoid that as that is what she was.  And it is what it is. 

Robert Krog: If your story includes people of diverse backgrounds, write those diverse characters based on people you actually know, not on stereotypes.  Most folks are not stereotypes.  They may spend a fair amount of time spouting ideology, grievances and talking points, but they do have lives outside of those things, for the most part. The sad truth is that some people are exactly like the stereotypes.  The glad truth is that most aren’t.  Recognizing that all members of the human race have certain common concerns regardless will go a long way toward making characters believable and real. 

It’s a bad idea, generally speaking, to start out writing a story to make a political point.  It’s much better to start out with (a) true-to-life character(s) and then put that/those character(s) into a situation involving socio-political issues relevant to racial/cultural/gender interaction. 

Incidentally, it usually helps not have characters self-consciously preface what they say or do with, “As a fat, white, middle-aged male, I think…” Or, “As a short, skinny, Polynesian woman brought up in Brooklyn, I always…”  There are some folks who shove their identity into the conversation every time they have the chance, of course.  Most people do what they do and say what they say without that.

Adam L. Garcia: Just simply make them complicated, human characters first, their culture, race, sexuality comes second.. Just like you would do with any other character. Focus on the content of the character and then reflect how their background would influence them

Chuck Dixon: Figure out what your characters want. Build a three dimensional character. If your character is only about their "diversity" then they're boring stereotypes and far more insulting to the minority you're trying to represent than not including them would be.

Beau Smith: Again, likable characters. Everything else is secondary, gender, sex, race, whatever.

Anna Grace Carpenter: In order to try and get a broader group of characters, I ask myself what might prevent folks from multiple cultures living together. Then I figure out what sorts of things might cause them to live together. I don't look for token representation (one of every category) but attempt to create a group that indicates there is diversity, even beyond the characters I'm writing about.

B. Clay Moore: Build a cast naturally, and ask yourself if you're truly representing the environment in which you've set your story. Personally, I feel it's important to represent diversity even if the story doesn't demand it. I just think a diverse cast adds depth to the world I'm creating, and I understand that there's an audience out there actively seeking cultural and racial representations they can relate to. There's absolutely no harm in gender-switching or race-switching a character whose identity isn't wrapped up in being a white dude. But in doing so, consider how their relationship to their environment changes with the switch, if at all.

Logan Masterson: There has to be a convergence though, of meaning, market and entertainment. The market wants diversity. Diversity is definitely meaningful, and has plenty of room for fun.

And in a time where even what we consider diverse is still changing, it's an important area to explore. It wasn't that long ago that Irish and Italian people weren't "white." People of color weren't always thought of as people at all.

How can multi-cultural casting help your stories become better? How can it hurt them?

Chuck Dixon: Introducing multi-cultural-ism into a story for its own sake is idiotic pandering.

Adam L. Garcia: It represents modern society, and opens the story to readers of all kinds. It only hurts if you portray other cultures in a cliche negative fashion.

Lance Stahlberg: A monochrome cast has the potential to be really boring. And as I mentioned before, having too many characters who look and talk basically the same can get really confusing. I like to create as many different ways to refer to my characters possible, so that I don't have to fall back on the same words over and over again in my dialogue tags or when describing an action scene. One easy way to address both pitfalls is to vary up racial backgrounds.

But depending on the setting and the situation, throwing in characters of color might come across as a lame attempt at political correctness. In the real world, people of the same cultural and ethnic background tend to congregate. Not always, but a lot. It doesn't make them racist. It's just a fact of life that we never used to question. Same goes with a group of guys not necessarily having a female in their midst at all times and vice versa.

So if your story is about a crew in the Italian Mafia, or a bunch of rich kids in a suburban high school, or a farming community in rural Illinois -- or for that matter if it's set in east or west Baltimore, or the south side of Chicago, or Chinatown -- then you are not necessarily looking for ethnic diversity among the main characters. There are other ways to make characters unique without relying on race.

It's worth repeating: Don't overthink it. The story comes first.

Percival Constantine: As Adam said, it reflects modern society. But know why you're doing it. And know the cultures you're depicting. Living in Japan, I've seen lots of stories about Japanese characters that get it incredibly, insultingly wrong. Many western writers seem to assume Japanese history consists of three periods—the samurai era, WW2, and modern Japan. So you get things like samurai walking around with katana in stories set centuries before those things were even invented.

Robert Krog: The real world often involves people of different ethnicities brought up in different cultures meeting and doing things together.  We meet, trade, cooperate, fight, enslave, intermarry, etc.  Given this circumstance, stories involving such people interacting in such ways will tell truths about humanity.  But then, insular or isolated societies and peoples have also existed and still do exist. Stories of such isolated people can also tell truths about humanity.  I suggest, of course, that one should not write about what one doesn’t know.  If you haven’t a clue about a certain culture, and research isn’t helping, stop your story until you do if the culture in question is pivotal to story.  Not knowing your subject matter can kill your story. 

If your story doesn’t really need a particular character of a particular cultural or ethnic background and you force it in anyway for whatever purpose, it will probably show to the detriment of the story.  Readers will notice and probably not like it.  If the character’s particular ethnicity or culture is nice background color, that’s good and adds flavor to the work as a whole.  If it becomes an unnecessary or forced plot point, readers may notice and resent it.  Of course, the cultural meeting/clash may be vitally important to the plot and socially relevant at the moment and maybe even a timeless theme. That’s great. Go for it.  Know your stuff though.  Get it right.  You don’t want your protagonist who is an African American gangsta type to bravely face his fate with his shirt tucked in.  I believe sagging pants are the M.O. there.  He’ll rush out the door, facing down The Man with one hand holding his Glock sideways and the other holding his pants up.  That’s the stereotype, of course, but if you don’t know that, you can’t address it one way or another, and it sure will show if you don’t. 

Anna Grace Carpenter: Multi-cultural casting provides the opportunity both for more story conflict and deeper empathy and, for me, gives me a chance to explore real life issues without necessarily writing about "real life" circumstances. Lack of research into those issues and how they play out across different cultures can come across as patronizing or simply ignorant and weaken the story by falling into stereotypes.

B. Clay Moore: As I said above, it adds depth to the world you've created, and opens the door for a variety of perspectives. It only hurts a story if you're obviously pandering to an audience, or if you're a shitty writer who leans on stereotypes and broad tropes. In that case, though, your book is probably going to suck with or without a diverse cast. After all, part of being a good writer is being able to convincingly sell the reader on the believability of a variety of character types, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or race.

As a straight white male writer, I fully understand that I won't get "credit" for the diversity of my cast, but it's still important to me not to present the universe only in shades of pasty pale.

Beau Smith: If it is a part of the real story and not forced upon you by a non-writer, editor, marketing, then it's fine, but what comes out of my imagination is what I've made up to be entertaining to hopefully more folks than myself.

Gordon Dymowski: Multicultural casting only hurts if I either do it to fulfill someone else's political agenda or if I choose to rely on outmoded tropes (the streetwise African-American male, the Asian tech expert, etc). Writing about certain time periods provides a great opportunity to write about other cultures with sensitivity and insight within a very oppressive, less enlightened historical context.

Think that writing for diverse, different perspectives is a challenge....well, let me provide a great example of such writing being done right: the television show Leverage provides a showcase where every role is played and written with a mind towards diversity/inclusion, but not at the expense of the overall narrative. If you think it's merely too much work….maybe you should consider not being a writer. (Also, for those who complain that such writing is "politically correct"....the 1990s just called; they want their overused catchphrases back).

John Morgan 'Bat' Neal: It can hurt if it’s just used as a device without any real story telling reason or purpose other than to be PC or inclusive.   Two of my projects have female leads.  Both lead a team of very varied individuals of various colors, sexes, sizes, and personalities.  But none of them were created with some agenda in mind of some meaningful message.  The only thing done on purpose was them all being different.  That is the hook that gets me.  And it comes from being a fan of Doc Savage’s Famous Five, and the Fantastic Four, and The Legion of Superheroes, and all the other things I love that had rich varied casts of all sorts of different folks.  That to me provides some of the richest story telling possible.