Today I wrote a post I've been mulling for weeks over at BlogHer. Here's a teaser -- click the link at the end for the full post!
A few weeks ago, I drove down to The Writers Place in Kansas City, Miss., (full disclosure: I serve on the board of directors) to talk to a group of around twenty upper middle-school kids about writing fiction. We ended up talking about race.
I didn't start there. I started with writing process. I talked aboout how I wrote my first novel in ever-lengthening Word documents saved by date and how the novel I'm working on now is coming together thanks to software called StoryMill. How this time I'm writing in scenes, not chapters, because it's totally easier for me that way. Their eyes glazed. I passed around my scene list and long outline for my new novel. They shuffled the paper around the room. I was losing them fast, and I still had the better part of an hour to go.
The group of kids was diverse. There were black kids and white kids and Asian kids and biracial kids. So I threw out a question that has been nagging at me ever since I learned that children's book publishing hasn't kept pace with census data regarding racial demographics. How did the kids feel about a white author writing nonwhite characters?