DEI Writing Handbook

Writing characters whose backgrounds differ from your own tends to make writers anxious, and that anxiety usually produces one of two bad results.

Either the writer avoids difference entirely and writes a monochrome world, or they write characters defined solely by their identity, checklists of traits standing in for people. Both fail for the same reason: they treat identity as the character instead of as one layer of a whole human being. This course teaches a way past the anxiety, by building every character from psychology first.

The core idea is that human psychology runs on patterns holding across every background. Build on those patterns and you produce real characters of any identity. Build on identity alone and you produce artificial ones.

Psychology runs deeper than identity

Human psychology works by observable patterns that exist regardless of background. Attachment styles. The ways people organize information. The ways they express emotion and build relationships. These are the deep structures of a person, and they cut across every ethnic, cultural, and social line. A character with an anxious attachment style, from any background, seeks reassurance and fears abandonment in recognizable ways. Start there, at the level of universal human psychology, and you’re building a person instead of a representative.

This is why psychology has to come before identity in character construction.

Build from a real psychological core and the character is already a specific human being. Identity becomes one of the layers shaping how that psychology expresses itself, instead of the whole of who they are. Build the other way, starting from identity and adding traits to match, and you get a figure who exists to represent a category. That reads as artificial however respectfully it’s done.

The deep patterns make a character feel like a person. Identity textures those patterns. It doesn’t replace them.

Psychology first is the method I trust for any character, whoever they are. It produces a person every time, and it takes most of the anxiety out of the work, because you’re writing a human being you understand from the inside.

Identity forms through experience

Identity isn’t a fixed label a person carries.

It forms through experience, through the things that happened to this particular person. Two people who share a background can be different for that reason. A character’s relationship to their own identity is itself a product of their history, their family, the particular events that shaped how they see themselves and their place in the world. A character who has an identity differs from a character who’s a stand-in for an identity.

Writing this way means asking how a particular character came to their sense of themselves, instead of assigning them the assumed attitudes of their category. Two characters from the same background might relate to it in opposite ways.

One embracing it, one in tension with it, because their individual experiences differed. That individuality is exactly what makes each of them a real person.

My favorite idea in the whole course is this one. Two people from the same street can grow up with opposite feelings about where they came from, and a book that allows for that feels alive in a way a demographic sketch never will.

When you trace a character’s identity to their specific lived experience instead of to a demographic assumption, you get someone particular and believable, and that’s the goal. The character owns their identity the way real people do, through the history that formed them.

People carry multiple identities at once

Real people are never a single identity. They’re the intersection of many, their background, their family role, their work, their generation, their beliefs, their temperament, all layered and sometimes in tension. A character built on one identity layer is flat, but a character built on the mix of several is dimensional, because the layers create the internal complexity that real people have. The tension between a character’s different identities is often the source of the most interesting drama.

So you build characters with multiple layers that interact, and you pay special attention to where those layers pull against each other. A person torn between the expectations of their upbringing and the demands of their present life, between who their family needs them to be and who they’re becoming, has the kind of internal conflict that generates real story.

The pull between layers is where I’d send any writer hunting for drama. A character caught between what their family expects and who they’re becoming has a story built in before the plot even starts, and flattening that tension throws away the best material on the table. That’s how you write depth into any character regardless of background, by refusing to reduce them to one dimension and instead building the several layers whose interaction makes a person feel complicated and true. One layer is a label. Several in tension is a human being.

Cultural patterns are real, not political

Cultures do shape how people organize information, express emotion, and build relationships, and these patterns persist across generations. Writing them well means treating them as real structures that shape a character’s behavior, neither ignoring them nor exaggerating them into stereotype. A character formed within a particular cultural pattern will tend to communicate and relate in ways that pattern shapes, and rendering that accurately is part of writing them as a full person instead of a generic one.

The skill is holding two things at once: the cultural pattern is real and shapes the character, and the individual is more than the pattern. A character expresses their culture through their own particular personality, so two people from the same culture express it differently, filtered through their individual psychology. Get this right and you avoid both errors, the flatness of ignoring culture entirely and the stereotype of reducing a person to it.

Stereotype and erasure bother me for the same reason. Each one lets the writer skip the work of knowing a specific person. A writer who holds the culture and the individual in the same hand has the harder job, and I think that’s the only approach that respects the character. The cultural structure is one of the forces that shaped a specific human being, and writing it with that balance, real but not total, lets you write across difference with confidence instead of anxiety.

How can AI help with DEI Writing?

The characters are yours and the psychological work is the craft. No tool builds a person. But a tool helps with the checking. You can use AI to test whether a character is built on real psychology or has collapsed into a single-identity checklist.

You can have it flag where a character’s behavior reads as stereotype instead of as an individual expressing a background through their own personality. You can use it to check whether the layers of a character’s identity interact or just sit side by side.

It points out the flatness, and you build the person. I think writers who avoid difference out of fear are cheating themselves out of half the people worth writing about, and the psychology-first method is the best reason I know to stop being afraid.

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