So, I’ve made a free resources tread for diversity, but I think it’s time that I open this up to some amazing books that you can buy to help you with your writing overall!
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Incomplete Guides has got a new one out: Writing About Sexual Assault.
So far the one on writing black characters is absolutely fantastic, so I don’t feel bad recommending this at all. People need to learn to write sexual assault without glorifying anything and I trust this publisher to deliver a book that does just that. If I’m proven wrong when it comes out, I will retract this statement.
They also have Writing Autistic Characters. Again, this is an area that needs so much development. People use “autist” and “autistic” as an insult these days and it really does hurt representation of people on the spectrum.
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Awesomsauce!!! Where can I buy this since I’ll need this for my novel.
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Can I recommend some books too?
The links will take you to the kindle store!
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Of course! I may edit your posts to include amazon affiliate links if that’s ok
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I won’t mind. Anything to help the forums flourish
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I am currently reading Salt & Sage’s How to Write Black Characters (either the first or second book in the Incomplete Guides series. Two of them came out at the same time). I think it’s brilliant! I can’t believe it has taken so long for something like this to come out! Because of everything I have going on, I am currently only on Chapter 2, but I have taken some serious notes, because it doesn’t just tell you what the stereotypes are. It tells you why they’re bad and how you can fix them. Also, how some of them have their roots in slavery and colonialism. Very interesting book. As the name suggests, though, it is only the start of getting representation right. It is an incomplete guide because you can never stop learning about any kind of representation! People are not monoliths!
This started off with me making notes to write a review on the book for the blog, but then I ended up learning so much that it morphs later on into me just writing notes for my own sake!
After that, I will be reading How to Write Asexual Characters, which also sounds like it is going to be a good read. To be honest, I don’t know a whole lot about the stereotypes surrounding ace characters, so this should be very interesting for me! The good thing about these guides is that they are short and to the point. They’re only about 100 pages long, but not a single word is wasted. That means that they are really easy to get through, but they teach you so much and point you in the right direction to keep learning!
I’ve read the only other book on writing diversity that I could find on the Kindle store: Writing Diverse Characters for Fiction, TV or Film and I have to say that I wasn’t impressed by it at all. For the price it is, it doesn’t offer a whole lot of advice. I feel like the audience it would appeal to is so niche. Particularly, it’s people who don’t know if they should make their casts more diverse, but are open to being converted to the “liberal side”. The writer spends so much time talking about how diversity is profitable and giving all these reasons why people should make casts more diverse, which is great! But then when it comes to the how side of things, they kinda fall flat. They don’t provide a whole lot of information. In fact, they give less information than what you can find on my blog. A few Twitter accounts (some now defunct). A reminder to do your research and be sensitive. Etc etc. It’s basic stuff.
I think the fact that the Incomplete Guides books dedicate one book to each minority group gives them the time to breathe and actually help you to write the diverse cast you want to write. I hope they write a book tying them all together in the end, because intersectionality is an important thing to understand if you want to get the picture of what life is like for someone who falls into more than one minority group, but I really appreciate the care and equal treatment that each group has gotten so far!
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Awesomsauce.
I tried to buy the physical copy but it won’t let me. Oh well, I guess I can use the Internet for good research.
Try again? 
I fixed the link!
Sorry I took forever Shannii 
The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression
The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes
The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma
Bump!
I bookmarked this thread. I’ll come back later today.
Bump
Added tags.
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Closed due to inactivity