As my friends in Minnesota are fond of sayin'... Ya! You betcha!
I recently had a reader ask me if anybody had ever given me any flack for writing stories with black heroines in them. What she meant was... How does a white woman get away with writing about black people? I responded, not at all. Which was true.
In the interests of full disclosure, yes, I am a white woman and I write sexy black heroines all the time. Why do I do it? First of all, because there's a market for it. And secondly, because I like my writing to represent people with a wide range of physical attributes. Skin color is just another variant in a range of physical traits for the human type critter, along with eye color and hair color, size, shape, and geographic origin.
I don't write stories that tackle race relations...I just write stories about people.
But, I realize that's a simplistic response and it really does go deeper. So here's the second part of the answer. I can write characters who are different from me because, like all writers, I'm a student of human nature. I watch, I listen, I pay attention. That's how I can write heros, despite the fact that I have boobs instead of pecs. #:0)
Some people will tell you that you can't write about people who are different than you are because you can't get inside their skin. My response to that is, bullsh! If that were true our fiction choices would be oh so limited and boring. Besides, they're my characters, I know what's inside their skin because I put it there!
Happy Reading!
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