Characters are people. Even when a character is a dog or an exotic alien, we are still writing about the human experience from a human perspective. The most important detail to keep in mind when creating characters is that people are people well before they are members of a specific gender, ethnicity, or anything else.   

Think of a character. Whether it’s a character in your own work or Darth Vader from Star Wars really makes no difference. Now consider what it is that makes this character compelling, what is it about them that stirs the emotions? It may be their drive to succeed against all odds or a darkly brooding hint at redemption, but I’m willing to bet that it won’t be the colour of their eyes, hair, or skin.

When creating a character, what an author is really doing is forming a person. How you go about that is subjective and the purpose of this post is not to endorse a specific method above all others. Rather, I would recommend you consider the question of diversity only once you already have a picture of the sort of people you plan to write about.

Consider each character as a culmination of two aspects. Who the character is in terms of the role they play in the story, their skills and personality traits should be fixed, but what they are, their gender, sexual orientation, and physical appearance should have a certain amount of flexibility.

I have a little exercise to illustrate this concept and help you understand how to implement it. The first step is to take a main character and swop their gender. How does your opinion of the character change? Plucky, sassy heroines too often become intolerable jerks when you transform them into males while heroes come across as a peculiar combination of emotionally distant and whiny. If the characters contain any flaws in regards to gender roles, then this will illuminate them. Now take it a step further by performing an ethnicity transplant. Can your character still accomplish their goals if they’re black, Asian, or Hispanic?

Ideally, changing what your character is should not produce a fundamental shift in who they are or how they interact with the plot. It will raise some questions concerning their cultural identity, but none of this should be an impossible obstacle. If it is then you’ll have to scrutinise the reasons why to discover if they’re justifiable.

 A character’s personality trumps their appearance. One could even argue that appearance is superfluous, which makes the question of diversity and representation even more of a no brainer. Darth Vader wouldn’t be any less fearsome or enigmatic if he’d been a woman. Triss Prior would still be brave and self-sacrificing if she’d been Hispanic. The conflict between Steve and Tony in Captain America: Civil War might even have been better if they had romantic feelings for each other.

Write your story and populate it with characters most suited to the task set to them by the plot. Know who they are intimately, then question everything else about them. Most importantly, have fun with this.