Writing People Who Aren't You

Let me first say I am a white person. So my opinion may or may not be valid, I personally believe that people should write about anyone if there isn't malicious intent behind it. I'm 100% behind the notion that if you only write about people like yourself (i.e. the characters in your world are ethnically, sexually, gender-ally (not a word but okay) etc. all the same, but more so if your character showcases majority groups and no minority groups), your works would be boring. We wouldn't have a lot of great works if it wasn't for people writing outside their race and gender, hell even our species! A.A. Milne wrote about fictional stuffed toys that have spanned for generations in film, tv, books and video games. 

Though, the one place where I will say 'no you shouldn't write about this' is if there is a malicious intent behind it - that's where I will draw the line because it's not cool. Many writers aren't doing it with that intent, but some may and that's when others need to call them out. I write stories with people of colour in mind for the characters, and again - I am white, but I write these characters because my world is filled with not just white people, I live in a very multi-cultural city, where I live on the peninsula isn't so multi-cultural as a majority of people are white here, when I went to high school there was only 1 black person and 1 Asian person in my year level. Though before I moved I lived closer to the city so there were many people in my school from different cultural backgrounds. The suburbs don't influence my characters, Melbourne does. 

By creating a gate you're just keeping out many wonderful writers. If someone wanted to write about queer people, and they themselves aren't queer I say go for it. Just be respectful about the whole thing, especially if you're writing about trans people. It's not even that hard, but many people often worry about this. If you misgender your character, that's okay, go back and put in the correct pronoun. Many people won't judge you for your misgendering unless you are doing it on purpose and this comes back to the idea of malicious intent. 

I'm obviously very passionate about this idea of "writing what you know" and by writing what you know sure helps out a lot of young writers, but you get bored after a while. There's only so many pieces of work I can create about a white person who was born female now identified as genderqueer and pansexual with divorced parents and has lived in 10+ houses in 3 states. You've heard the story before. It's not new. So by limiting my creative freedom is damaging to future writers who want to write outside their class, race, gender, sexuality, etc.

If we were to write what we know, we sure as hell wouldn't have great works of fiction, is J.R.R. Tolkien a hobit? No. Is J.K. Rowling a magical wizard boy? No. Since the dawn of writing novels, no one said "we must write only what we know", "we must write only about us." What a yawn. Of course, there's no denying of writing characters that are like yourself, my favourite character, Mathias Laurent, is a French guy who is bisexual but homoromantic (though he's had an identity crisis and is in love with a woman), who is a philosopher and screenwriter. Of course, I am none of those, but I want to become a philosopher and write philosophical essays, much like what Mathias does. In my Nanowrimo novel from last year, the main character is genderqueer, and I too identify as genderqueer. It doesn't limit my writing, but I think because I'm from such a marginalized group (of course not to the extreme of people of colour, because I still have racial privileges) it helps my charactisation of writing. I could talk about this idea for a while, but write whatever the fuck you want, and if you don't feel comfortable writing it, then don't write it. 

You do you boo.