Writing the Other: A Practical Approach

This is good and probably very helpful to others - maybe even very helpful to me sometime in the future - but it's also very reliant on exercises. I have trouble with exercises, in general: partly because I'm impatient and want to hurry through the book, and partly because for me exercises work better if I can integrate them into my current work somehow, and as of reading this I'm in the midst of a bout of earthquake-induced writer's block so, well. Something to come back to and try another time.

I read this story in brief spurts, and then read the main section a second time in about a day. The book is an interesting read. If you've spent any time at all on tumblr, or any of the numerous social awareness websites some of this will seem fairly tame and "well duh." Regardless it's a good, basic read through that offers up both new, and common sense ideas. I will admit that one of the things I took away from it was a sureness that adding "the Other" to my writing is okay, done properly of course. That's something I worry about as a white, cis female writer, but I'm also dead set against writing a make believe, all white, all cis, all straight cast. That's not what the world looks like, and I might be writing fantasy, but that's show more zero excuse to whitewash every bit of it.

This is definitely a book I'll keep and refer back to as I edit, etc. A good one for a writer's book case. show less

I haven't found much else out there on this topic: writing fiction about characters who don't share your subject position in terms of race/gender/sexual orientation/ability/age/etc. So I was glad to find this book and glad science fiction writers wrote it. It's got some writing exercises I can imagine using in a creative-writing class. There are people to whom I'd like to give a copy (anonymously). But I wish it was better than it was, more challenging, hadn't intentionally and for confusing reasons left out class...

A bit too 101 on the subject but the exercises earn it the fourth star.

Much shorter than I would have liked; the main part of the book is less than 75 pages, though the other essays are also interesting. It was also more focused on expanding one's viewpoint than on writing per se -- a valuable goal, to be sure, but not exactly what I was hoping for.

Short, helpful rundown of the basics.

Very helpful, just not long enough.