A common question I see people pose authors is often a variant of  “Why Did {Character} have to be [X]? Where the X is gay/ethnic/transgender/sex or some other classification that less often found in fiction and media. What I find fascinating about the inquiry is the assumptions that underline the question, that a character that is not representative of the ‘norm’ has to have their existence justified, that there must a reason, a sufficient reason, for creating a character with the questioned identity. The inverse of that is very rarely asked. Characters with common attributes are simply accepted.

Now sometimes a character is a member of a group because the story requires it in order to explore what the creator what to talk about. These are usually stories about bias, prejudice, and the way we treat the others. In my Nationalized Space novel Seth is an American for that very reason. Being an America, a man from a declined empire, is essential to the story and to the character. But there are lots of stories where the character isn’t there to explore injustice and prejudice. People of all stripes exist in stories beyond the injustices their groups have suffered and they should not be ghettoed to only stories about their pain.

If I make a character that occupies a role other than the expected ones it is usually because that is how the character works for me. I’ll start with just free form thinking about the character, imagining their relationship, their history, getting a sense have how they ‘taste’ in my mind. When an aspect feels right it gets locked in, aspects that scrape against the character, as they exist in my mind are rejected. It’s an intuitive process that doesn’t go for the default but rather questions in what way does this character not fit the default. The truth is that all of us vary from expected defaults and finding those way in fictional persons help make them deeper and more realistic simulations of persons rather than simply a collection of attributes fulfilling plot functions.