Why and How to Write LGBTQIA+ Characters

By Jessi Honard and Marie Parks, co-authors of Unrelenting.

Diverse representation in fiction is important, full stop. We hear that all the time, both as writers and as readers. But why? We’re co-authors, Marie Parks and Jessi Honard, and here’s our take on why and how to write LGBTQIA+ characters.

While we’ll be focusing on queer fictional characters, know that diverse representation—including race, ability, body type, gender, culture, neurodiversity, and more—deserves just as much love and attention.

It’s important to see yourself in stories.

When we were kids, there were very few instances of queer characters in children’s literature. Honestly, we’re struggling to think of any. As we grew up and started reading adult fiction, the situation wasn’t much improved. 

As a result, we didn’t understand the full scope of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow. There were limited safe places to learn about these identities.  

But you know what is a safe space? A cozy book you can curl up with in your favorite spot, read on your own time, and think about in the privacy of your own mind.

Imagine a world where queer readers are validated by the books they love. In this way, representation can literally save lives.

It’s important to see others in stories.

It’s not just about queer readers seeing themselves in literature, though. It’s about the whole world seeing queer characters in literature. 

When non-queer readers witness LGBTQIA+ people within stories, it becomes easier to see actual, real-life queer people as heroic, capable, and nuanced, just like their cisgendered, heterosexual, and allosexual peers. They become less tokenized, and their experiences become more normalized. 

We write speculative fiction, so we deal with fantasy, magic, and impossibility. But at the same time, we are creating the real world we wish to live in. 

No, we don’t want to get attacked by sentient smoke, the way Bridget (the protagonist of Unrelenting) does. But we do want to live in a world where Bridget’s asexuality is accepted, cherished, and supported.

We also don’t want to have to keep secrets from competing magical factions the way Dan (a side character within the same novel) does. But we do want to live in a world where his bisexuality is not a source of tension or anguish.

So we’ve written an exciting world full of mystery, suspense, and magic. And in that world, our characters’ queerness is a nonissue. We believe this gives our readers a chance to envision and create this reality. 

Tips for writing LGBTQIA+ characters as an ally.

Let’s be honest, you could take a series of masterclasses on the expansive topic of how to write LGBTQIA+ characters. No short article is going to teach you everything you need to know, and we certainly aren’t experts. But we hope to give you a few pointers to get started.

Before we jump in, we’ve run into two main camps of non-queer writers who want to write LGBTQIA+ characters, and yet they feel stumped. Do you fall into one of these camps?

Writers in camp one recognize the importance of writing diverse characters, but because their own life experience doesn’t mirror their characters’, they are nervous about getting something wrong and offending everyone. If this is you, you are an awesome ally, and you’re loved and appreciated. In our experience, someone who worries about being disrespectful will find ways to ensure they are respectful in the end. Keep going.

Those writers sitting in camp two also recognize the importance of writing diverse characters. However, they’re so gung-ho, they don’t bother with research or examining their own biases and assumptions. If this is you, please slow your roll. Your heart is in the right place, but your execution will likely come across as inauthentic and possibly even offensive. 

We recommend digging deep into reputable resources like Writing the Other. Not only are their articles, books, and lectures instructive, they’re super interesting! Plus, you can dive into extremely important topics like intersectionality, which can dramatically impact how you write your characters across the board. 

We also challenge you to do your research, yourself. And by that, we don’t mean asking your friendly neighborhood queer buddy to exhume all their trauma.

Recognize that queerness is all around us. In the US, over 20% of Gen Z adults and 10% of Millennials identify as LGBTQIA+, so odds are you know queer people (even if they’re not out). With that in mind, include a variety of queerness in your stories. Avoid having a single, token representative of the community (and for the love of Pete, don’t immediately kill them off or make them an under-developed baddie, as this is a tired and harmful trope).

Read diversely. Listen to real people’s stories. Work with a sensitivity reader and/or experts when you need information or advice, and pay them for their time and emotional labor. If someone tells you, “I can’t help,” honor their boundaries (and maybe examine if you’re asking too much).

Bottom line: Be respectful, and view the task of writing queer characters as an important and serious responsibility.

Writing LGBTQIA+ characters is an extremely worthwhile aspiration, and we applaud and celebrate you for taking the plunge. Together, we can co-create a beautiful, accepting, diverse world where there’s room for everyone at the table—and on the page.

About the guest bloggers:

Jessi Honard and Marie Parks are best friends, hiking and camping buddies, and unabashed nerds. They’ve been co-writing speculative fiction since 2009, and their 2022 contemporary fantasy debut, Unrelenting, was a finalist in the 2020 Book Pipeline Unpublished Manuscript contest. Jessi lives in the Bay Area of California with her partner, Taormina, and Marie lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Flor Salcedo and Joanna Truman on Community Born from Creativity

This experience of a community coming together is best told by the voices that are part of it, thirteen voices blended together into one harmony. One book of short stories that came to be through this opportunity to unite and be something bigger together. 

Shadowing the tone of the girls in RISK by Rachel Hylton, we are the authors of the FORESHADOW YA Anthology: Joanna, Flor, Rachel, Mayra, Desiree, Linda, Gina, Maya, Sophie, Adriana, Tanvi, Nora, Tanya. One amazing opportunity to experience and celebrate the magic of reading and writing YA.

Foreshadow anthology was born out of the love of storytelling. It’s just that simple. We have always known a project like this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and not just for the writers—the readers, too.

The most amazing thing about Foreshadow is that it’s not simply the experience of reading the stories. It’s a peek into what makes the stories—and by nature, their authors—tick. Snippets of the author’s inspiration, what propels them, word over word, into the next crescendo and the soft fall into a valley. The rise to the ending, a bright, sometimes violent crash, and the yawn afterwards, sinking into what you’ve just experienced. 

And then, even more. Discussion on story building, craft, and writing prompts. All in one nice little packaging of a book.

The editors of this anthology, Emily X.R. Pan and Nova Ren Suma, had a vision to lift emerging writers, to showcase underrepresented voices. The result of this journey is a creation that unguards a writer’s heart and builds a community. When we read the stories that aren’t ours, we find something new to love about writing every time. And that feeling, that love? We need to hold onto it, now more than ever.

Because writing is hard. Living is hard. But together, they make something amazing.

Both stories and life are made of moments; short stories, even more so. A single moment captured forever. Like in Joanna Truman’s story, anything can spark a story, the GLOW of a memory, long drives on the highway in the middle of the night. In Flor Salcedo’s thrilling ride, something as innocent as the sweet scent of PAN DULCE can carry you across time to a distinct place over borders where danger and excitement lurk at every corner—but you have to see it for yourself. These moments tend to do something to you, and Desiree Evans captures this something perfectly, growing a feeling deep in your BELLY that’s like a river’s powerful innards.

Mayra Cuevas shows us what it is like to have a deep longing for a sunny home you left—a Puerto Rico that has just been pummeled by a hurricane—but you keep it in your heart. Just so, there was a pull inside the Foreshadow authors that wanted the world to be there with us, our experiences, where we come from, our gravitas, quirkiness, and poise—what makes us the writers we are. But it’s just not possible to pocket readers and take them with us (sadly). Just like in Cueva’s story, we were RESILIENT and dug deep to put a piece of ourselves in our stories and took ourselves to the reader. 

With determination and a dash of vulnerability we leapt. Knowing our friends and family and strangers will read our work, that they might recognize flashes of faces or places or events. They might wonder, is that what she thinks of me? Is that what they remember from that night? Are those what their demons look like? 

Tanvi Berwah’s look into inner demons illustrates how some are like secrets, ones that pull you in and lock you up in a pochette without an ESCAPE. In Nora Elghazzawi’s piece, inner demons look like a stopped clock that the world has not waited for them to catch up, and SOLACE does not come easily. Or like Gina Chen puts it, what haunts us within sometimes show up like FOOLS simply in their own skin, feathered and smiling, and who’s to know if you can trust them or not?

When you’re writing, you are spilling your soul, swirling around the effervescent feelings inside and trying to siphon them into something that makes sense. It can be lonesome. Isolating. 

But like the protagonists in all these stories—when there’s no escape, we change and create one. When we can’t find solace, we grow it. When we’re faced with a demon, we make it our own.

We are the ones who have been told that our stories are unrelatable. Or perhaps the excuse that no one wants to read about girls who make other girls’ hearts rumble, and who needs to delve into realistic violence that rips through communities and steals a chunk of teens’ innocence. Maya Prasad’s story contemplates on what makes us human and imagines artificial intelligence that yearns to take a PRINCESS for itself in digital immortality. But not before being told her art is not needed. These types of words can cinch around your neck like a leash allowing self-doubt to creep in.

But then.

But then, you find someone like you. You’re surrounded by other writers and their stories, arms around one another forming an impenetrable wall. Others read your words and marvel and support you. They hold your hand as you make your way through the darkest part of the woods. It is as if you’ve been trapped inside the wrong skin and now that you’ve found the right one, you are ready to take FLIGHT, as Tanya Aydelott demonstrates. 

You feel— 

Invincible.

Like in Adriana Marachlian’s story, when you see your reflection in the dark tunnels and look for the light, you aren’t facing the MONSTERS alone anymore. When you slip underwater and reach out for someone, you don’t have to be afraid of drowning. You do the same as in Linda Cheng’s piece, push out of the shell that binds you. You are no longer SWEETMEATS to those who want to eat you alive and watch you fail. 

And that changes everything.

We know that the world does want our stories. Our voices are important.

Like in Sophie Meridien’s BREAK, we are here to break the streak of letting the skeptics dictate the worth of our voices. We are made because we write our stories anyway.

Rachel put it well, we are all lobsters. We simply are. Beautifully strange, fierce, horrific, amazing creators of our worlds who cherish and support each other. And we won’t unlobster.

And to you, reading this, our fellow storytellers—because you don’t need to be a writer to tell your story—let this be a letter to you from your community, as we gather around you and peer over your shoulder at all you have to give. No matter what the world tries to say to you, your story is needed, in all its pain and glory, wonder and weirdness. You? You are needed.

So come on in, and tell us a story.

Flor Salcedo was born and raised in the border town of El Paso, Texas. She currently resides in Austin, Texas with her husband and five cats. She has always been fascinated with anything tech and as a result, gravitated toward software which she’s been programming for over a decade.

When she isn’t doing writerly or programmer things, she is curling up with her cats and catching up on sleep, dreaming of the day she can become a full-time writer. Find Flor on Twitter: @FlorSPower

Joanna Truman is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer based in Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Film Production from the FSU College of Motion Picture Arts and is the creative director at Soapbox Films, where she was a writer on season one of Muppets Now on Disney Plus. She has published speculative fiction in Apex Magazine and Luna Station Quarterly and has been featured in the nationally broadcast NPR program To the Best of Our Knowledge. She also enjoys streaming video games and various shenanigans on Twitch. Find Joanna online at joannatruman.com, on Twitch @nimblefizz, and on Twitter and Instagram: @joannatruman.

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