Writing Difference

Any writer trying to create characters who, for whatever reason, do not usually appear in fiction faces specific aesthetic challenges. What happens if your character is less conventionally ‘relatable’? What if she is, for example, a British Muslim woman grappling with a religious crisis? Or a disabled man who spends two hours getting dressed each morning? How are such experiences – normal to those undergoing them, unusual to many readers – to be incorporated into literature? How much to explain? How much to ‘humanise’ without patronising both the character and the reader? How to avoid exoticising? And how can you introduce humour when you don’t know who might be laughing?

By examining texts where writers have successfully taken on these challenges – and those who have been less successful – as well as looking at the participants’ own work, this course will teach strategies for writing about minority experiences, whether the writer’s own or those of others.