How Can You Write Another Culture And Get It Right?

Or: How does a New England Yankee write about rural Oklahoma?

Let's start off with a relevant quote from my upcoming book, The Dragon Kings Of Oklahoma:

“Dragons are only occasional carnivores. We need salt occasionally to top up our meat and vegetables; they need meat occasionally to top up their stone intake. All that hoo-rah about dragons devouring knights is just some bull the German kings made up to keep invaders away. Truth is, the dragons were more interested in eating the armor than the knights.”

“How do you know all that?”

“Watched a Netflix documentary,” said Wild-Eye serenely.

In the book, Wild-Eye’s scattershot research is both funny and a driving plot device within the book.

But as for scattershot research outside the book, well… I've lived in Connecticut and Ohio all my life, famously Northern whitebread states. I've certainly never lived rurally.

So when I got a great idea for a novel ("What if the Tiger King had baby dragons instead?"), I really risked stepping into a big ol' swamp of insulting stereotypes.

Because as one person asked when I announced the book: “My friend is wary of many books that feature rural settings because of heavy stereotyping, from southern belles to hillbillies. Was that something you thought about while writing the book?”

Oh yeah. I thought about it a lot.

So how did I avoid it?

Reader, I might not have.

Full truth: How can you write another culture and get it right?

Here's the honest answer: if you, O writer of one culture, wants to write about another culture, you will never fully succeed. And there's two reasons for that:

There is no monoculture.

Let's say that you wake one fine morning and shout out your windows "I, a white writer, will write a definitive novel about THE BLACK EXPERIENCE!" (Please don’t.) Well, that begs the question:

What the hell is The Black Experience?

It's not like Black people are a hive mind, waking up and collectively deciding "We'll have our coffee with two creams this morning." No, you've got Black nerds and devoted Black Baptists and queer Blacks and entrepreneur-minded Blacks and Black immigrants and light-skinned Blacks and… well, you can see how many experiences there are to have.

And even if you split that down to, say, provide the Definitive Experience for devoted Black Baptists, well, there’s an old joke that summarizes how well that’s gonna go:

A ship was sailing past a remote island and discovered a man who had been stranded there for several years. They went ashore to rescue the man and noticed he had built three huts for himself. They asked him, "What is the first hut for?"

He said, "That's my house."

"So what's the second hut for?"

"That's my church."

"Okay, so what's that other hut over there for?"

"Oh... that. That's the church I used to go to."

Point is, even in a very narrow group, you can’t necessarily get everyone to agree on what the experience is like. Even if I wrote perfectly about one Oklahoma redneck’s experience, there's almost certainly another Oklahoma redneck who finds that accurate description of an actual person inaccurate and, perhaps, offensive. I've stumbled upon online arguments where Black people are arguing about whether another person is sufficiently Black. There have been stories written by closeted trans/queer people where trans/queer reviewers complained they didn’t get the details right.

Truth is, “getting it right” is a sliding scale - and your goal is to get that slider as far into the green as possible. But you, O outsider, cannot and will not slam the slider up against the “100% Completed” barrier.

You can write something that is nuanced, respectful, and accurate - and should! But the picture you paint can’t be accurate for everyone, so brace yourself for (legitimate) negative feedback when you try.

Which is not to say there aren’t commonalities among a culture to help you nudge that needle! For example, almost every Black American faces a significant number of similar challenges in how they're perceived… but how each of them reacts to America's racism also varies. So your twin friends “nuance” and “specificity” become the name of the game.

And that’s why there are definitely ways to get someone else’s culture wrong. If you're writing a hardened gangbanger story about crack addicts living in the hood and speaking in bastardized Ebonics, well, go watch the excellent American Fiction and stand back as your blunt stereotypes are cuttingly dissected.

Highly recommended. Jeffrey Wright shoulda gotten the Oscar.

So if I wanna write about Oklahoma rural culture, then I'd better do all my due diligence in trying to accurately suss out which Oklahoma rural culture, and try to not just get the details right, but the feel right. It doesn’t matter if your rural protagonist is drinking the right brand of local beer if their mindset screams “city slicker.”

So you do your research. But then you understand:

You can never do enough research to fully bridge the gap.

So Cherie Priest, a very good writer (she's got a new novel out! Check it out!), wrote a book called Boneshaker, which was an award-winning, meticulously researched take on an alternate-universe 1870s Seattle. She spent a lot of time poring over old maps, immersing herself in historical documents, the whole bit - and Cherie's a smart cookie, when she says "I did research," I'm gonna assume she did it right.

And she did! The book sold well, got rapturous reviews.

Steampunk + zombies + good writing: Of COURSE it sold well.

Then she got an email from a guy complaining that this street she used in a zombie chase sequence wasn't actually located there in the 1870s, how dare she get it wrong.

Now, if I recall (this was a couple of conversations at a convention), Cherie knew that, she'd had to shift things around to make for a more exciting chase sequence - but the fact that this one experience soured the book for one dude is proof that it doesn't matter how thoroughly you try, somebody knows this stuff better than you.

(And for God's sake, if you're not a gun nut, do not try to write technical details about guns. You have been warned about the emails you will get.)

So again, it's a sliding scale - I've done a lot of research into Oklahoma culture, visited the areas, talked to folks, read local papers. But that’s never gonna be as accurate as people with boots on the ground!

And there are excuses you can generate: I mean, I could (rightfully) claim that this is fiction, there's werewolves and baby dragons and druids and also yes, for some reason drinking sweet tea in Oklahoma is now a perfectly normal and regular thing to do.

But it still rings false. And you, dear perfectionist, have to be content with that.

So how do you get it right enough?

First: If you wanna write about the stereotypes, stop.

The genesis for Dragon Kings of Oklahoma was watching Tiger King. I was thinking how cute the baby tigers were, thought, "But what if they were dragons?" and was off to the races - which is fine, that's a great shell to write a fun fantasy.

But what I didn't follow that up with was all the stereotypes - unwashed hillbillies guzzling moonshine, southern belles, barefoot kids shootin' off pop rifles and eatin' corn.

Here's the problem with stereotypes: Not only are they lazy and often insulting, but they're predictable. And with rare exceptions, people don't wanna read predictable.

No, what also had piqued my interest over the last twenty years was following the tragedy of the opioid epidemic as it spread across rural areas. My heart broke as I'd read all those stories of ordinary families getting swept up in a massive conspiracy to suppress just how addictive these pills were. And as such, I'd picked up a lot of anecdotal, on-the-ground evidence of what it was like for people in rural towns already.

Yeah, I wanted the Tiger King's larger-than-life characters - but I wanted that to be set against a backdrop of a very real America that is often screwed by both sides of the government. And that long-term fascination gave me the confidence to go "Okay, I’m not trying to toss off a quick book to exploit some locals."

Second: Do your research.

If you're writing something in the modern age, you don't have to pore over endless academic journals and memoirs to get things right. There's plenty of smaller ways to see how a town behaves, including:

• Social media. Following a few productive creators in the area, getting their takes on things (particularly on YouTube or TikTok) will often get you the flavor of what people are like. Don't just swig their feed for a day; really follow 'em for a couple of months, checking in, seeing the things that bother them and the people they hang with. That'll give you a sense of how they view their lives, which helps - and if you can find people with differing opinions on that area, so much the better.

• Comedy bits. Particularly pay attention to people doing comedy related to your topic - you don't wanna steal their jokes, but rather find the underpinnings to their humor, because humor is often a way of facing uncomfortable truths. Watching a lot of Matt Mitchell's comedy videos on the South made me understand just how prevalent the concept of "The local Dollar Tree" was; a couple of YouTube skits demonstrated some vital differences between "normal" rednecks and Oklahoman Yee-yee culture.

• Local papers. If you can find a town that matches, reading police blotters and town halls and letters to the editor gives you an underpinning of what problems plague the community. My lead character, Daisy, vapes constantly because I read some articles griping about how vaping has become a scourge on the county.

• Google Maps. Again, you wanna get the details street-right, or even just see how far away the local hospital is, do some directions. The town in my fictional Oklahoma, Douay, is based closely on two separate towns about the same size, about an hour apart - and when it came time to call an ambulance for someone, I realized the nearest hospital was a forty-minute drive away. That sure ratcheted the tension of the scene.

• Manuals and direct sources. Daisy is a functional pill addict. So I read many twelve-step manuals and many alternatives and critiques of the twelve-step manuals - not that Daisy is going into rehab (yet), but seeing what things people were doing before they had their come-to-Jesus moment helped influence Daisy's day-to-day activities.

• Stuff you already know. And you can get a head-start by writing in an area you already had some interest in! Like I said earlier, I had a lot of casual interest in the opioid epidemic, which already gave me a lot of insight into those smaller towns.

Sidenote: Do you want diversity readers?

I have a very mixed experience with diversity readers. I believe that everyone should be paid for their time, especially minorities of all stripes, especially for the labor that is a beta reading to check that you haven’t said anything too dumb.

I also believe there's not a lot of money in most writing, and paying qualified diversity readers what they're worth can leave you at a net loss... and that assumes you find a qualified one. (One of the readers I hired for a novel of mine cost about a fifth of my total advance, and what I got in return was a breezy "Yeah, you pretty much got it right!")

So you do want diversity readers to look over your novel before you start shopping it around, because diversity readers can catch offensive and inaccurate things very quickly. But the process of finding one who a) has the information you want, b) is available, and c) is willing to work at a reasonable price may not be something you have access to. There are lists you can use to find people, but the folks on there are often heavily requested and may not have time for you.

The short version is that if you can find qualified people to diversity read at a price you can afford, do it. But you may not be able to. Just realize that not doing so is removing a potential safeguard for a book blowing up in your face.

(Full disclosure: I did get some Okie folks to check my novel for me. Yet despite asking around a lot, I never did find a qualified Osage beta reader, which does make me nervous about one character in particular.)

Third: Take some advice from Stephen King and have your characters do their job.

If you'll notice, a lot of Stephen King books have a scene where the characters work for a while - the mortician prepares the body, the mechanic fixes a wheel, etc etc. He says that people like to watch people work.

And it's true. If you can research down to the fine details, having a scene where people do a job properly can buy you a lot of credibility that'll plaster over the smaller things you get wrong.

For example, there's a scene in Dragon Kings where Daisy runs pills - but it's not the dangerous dealer job where stands in an alley and rakes in the bucks. It's the "Uber delivery" type of delivery who gets his stock from a boss, drives around to his clientele (because they do deliver, these days), handles complaints and deals with returns (because one of the reasons the opioid epidemic became so ingrained is that dealers found out that "customer service" was important), and in general just demonstrates the small-stakes, small-cash job that a small-town dealer has.

Is that work glamorous? No. Is it reasonably accurate? As far as I can tell. But it's surprising enough that most people who haven't bought drugs from these sources will go "Oh, okay, that's new."

Fourth, and final: Make your characters interesting.

One of the best ways to avoid stereotypes is just good writing technique - make your characters interesting.

Yes, Daisy is an aging Oklahoma redneck who's struggling to keep a job thanks to a pill addiction and a bad hip that caused the pill addiction…. And if that was all of him, people would probably run me back to the suburbs.

But Daisy is also a staunch vegetarian in cattle country, which is why he's called "Daisy" - people make fun of him a lot. He also vapes constantly but hates the taste of tobacco or weed, so he's constantly plaguing his best friend with scents like "Pomegranate Spice" and "Cotton Candy." He also has a home that is his father’s last legacy to him - so, despite his ne'er-do-well nature, he's constantly pitting his addiction against his fear of losing the house that his Dad loved.

And he loves karaoke.

Daisy's got elements of stereotypes in him, but the interesting parts are where he diverges from that. Which also makes Daisy someone you're more likely to follow around through a whole novel! And in the end, that's really what you're aiming for.

Anyway, if you’re curious to see how well I succeeded, you can pre-order the book for a scandalously low $2.99. MARKETRON 3000 OUT