An interview with middle grade author and Newbery medalist Erin Entrada Kelly, where we discuss writing outside your lived experience.

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Transcript of Podcast episoDe 10: Interview with Erin Entrada Kelly, Middle Grade Author

Mary: Hello. This is Mary Kole and "The Good Story Podcast," helping writers craft a good story. With me, you will hear from thought leaders related to writing, and sometimes not, about topics important to writers of all categories and ability levels. Here is to telling a good story.

Erin, thank you so much for joining us. I am, of course, speaking to the lovely Erin Entrada Kelly, who has come to Story Mastermind to talk about something very important, timely, and vital to the bigger publishing discussion today. Thank you so much for joining us and for your time.

Erin: Thank you for having me.

Mary: Of course, my absolute pleasure. So what I wanted to talk to you about today, and we may range kind of all over the place, but this idea that we have of...there's this...so two poles of thought, one is write what you know in terms of how the writer positions their experience or somebody else's experience on the page, and the other extreme would be, well, fiction exists to get us into different shoes and to different experiences. So we could be anyone in fiction, we could represent anyone in fiction, and we're having a lot of discussion about what that means when writers want to write outside of their lived experience, whether that's race or no topicity, anything really that kind of takes us "out of our lane." What say you? So you wrote "Hello, Universe," which takes several different points of view, and some of them, I would imagine, are not necessarily lived experience for you. So I obviously thought of you for this conversation. What do you say just trying to dissect this really big topic?

Erin: So I mean, I think you said it. It's a really big topic and it's so complex. It's much more complex than I think people realize. And you know, I teach in the graduate publishing program at Rosemont College in Philadelphia, and one of the courses I teach is contemporary issues in children, you know, probably half of the semester talking about this issue and how it relates to all kind of different facets [inaudible 00:02:49]. So it's like a big issue that [inaudible 00:02:52], and I know, you know, we can't necessarily unpack in a short period of time, but I'll kinda give you as much perspective as I can in the time that we have. So I have a lot of thoughts and feelings on this, and I'm somewhere in the middle of those two poles but with different caveats, right. So in "Hello, Universe," I have four point-of-view characters, and kind of the one that takes up the most space is Virgil Salinas, who is a Filipino-American boy. So that is considered own voices, right, because I'm Filipino-American. And then we have Valencia, who is a girl who is deaf, which is not my lived experience. I'm a hearing person. And then we have Kaori Tanaka, who's Japanese-American. And then we have Chet Bullens, who's kind of like the neighborhood bully. And so these are my thoughts.

I wanted to write a book about Virgil and a shy, quiet, scared, sensitive boy, and the people around him in his world, which includes Valencia, who's the girl that he has a crush on and wishes he could speak to, and Kaori who is kind of his only friend and is a fortune teller, and she's 12. So in my mind, when I think of "Hello, Universe," you know, if someone were to ask me, is this an own voices book, my immediate thought is yes, because it's a story about Virgil. Because in my mind, he's kind of the main impetus. But then we have Valencia, right, and Valencia is deaf. She wears hearing aids, she lip-reads or speak-reads, and these are all experiences that I did not have and I knew very little about when I set out to write the book. So if I were to write a book about Valencia in which it centered her experience as a deaf girl, I think that's a book that I would not have written. And what I mean by that is the book is not about Valencia being deaf and what is it like to be a girl who is deaf. She's a character in the book who happens to be deaf, and I think that that is a...you know, it's kind of difficult to explain maybe eloquently what I mean, but the story is not about Valencia being deaf, right. She happens to be deaf. I would not write a book, me personally, about a girl who is deaf and that's what the book is about, only because I would be uncomfortable that's so far outside my lived experiences that I wouldn't be certain having navigated all the nuances if that's what the story is about. But this book is very much about Virgil and the people in his universe, no pun intended.

So one thing though that I did keep in mind is I was very aware, even before I started writing "Hello, Universe," that there is an authenticity question or issue and that this dialogue was happening in publishing. And now, it has ratcheted up exponentially, but even then, it was a very important dialogue topic. So I knew that if I was going to write this character, I had to be aware that I would be held accountable in a way that an author who is deaf or hard of hearing would not be. They're still held accountable. Even if you're writing in your own lane, so to speak, you're still held accountable. But if you're writing outside your lane, you're held to a higher standard. As you should be, by the way. So I knew that I would be more scrutinized. So with all this in mind, there was a period of time when I thought, "You know what, just forget it. I'm just gonna make Valencia hearing. I don't wanna make a mistake. I don't wanna disrespect anyone." And it wasn't me being like, "Well, fine, I just won't write about it then." It was more like I legitimately did not wanna want to upset a community, that I wanted to respect, right, and damage...

Mary: There's already controversy within the deaf community as to how, you know, if you get cochlear implants, for example, you know, are you still a part of the community? So there are so many layers that you can really drill into.

Erin: Yes. And that kind of, to my point too, Mary, is that, you know, if I were to say, "Oh, this is a very interesting topic, this debate within the deaf community, I wanna write a book about that," that's something I would not do just because it's centering in a lived experience that I don't have. But if I'm gonna write about this girl who is deaf and it happens to be part of her characterization and such, I thought, "Okay..." Well, first, I thought I'm just gonna make her hearing. But as we all know, sometimes our characters come to us in a certain way, and it's very difficult to imagine them in a different way, and it felt wrong to take that away from her, you know, in a sense. I mean, I'm speaking to other writers, so I know you know what I mean. But just that she wasn't the same character if I tried to do that. And I didn't wanna not do it just because...well, I decided to continue on with Valencia as she was, but I also did a lot of due diligence.

Mary: So you hesitated, right? You wondered if it was worth forging ahead. And I think that your point, to catch it before it slips away, is that this idea of standards is completely valid if we do choose to step outside of our lived experience. Writers everywhere need to be aware that they're gonna be examined for their choices, and like you said, rightfully so, that's kind of where it comes down for me. I say, well, you can make the choices that you're making but know that we live in a feedback loop where people will get on social media and they will examine what you're doing and people will...like these waters are not very calm waters. People will have an opinion. So you examined your choice, you thought about not doing it, and then you decided to forge ahead with Valencia, and you were thinking, "Okay, but I need to do this intentionally. I need to do this with research and with due diligence." So what did that look like?

Erin: So it looked like, first of all, you know, I had to not think of her as my deaf character in my book. I had to think of her as Valencia who is deaf and is also very many other things, willful, stubborn, independent, kind, you know, all these things. And I also knew that if I was gonna do this, I would have to confront every stereotype and misconception that I had, and I think this is the step where people fall behind often. We all think we're very open-minded great people. Nobody sits there and thinks, "Boy, I'm a real jerk." You know what I mean? We all think that we are progressive-minded people, but all of us have stereotypes and misconceptions, and you have to be willing to confront them. And so what I did was, first of all, I reached out to the American Society for Deaf Children. I reached out to Gallaudet University, which is the deaf university in Washington, D.C. I reached out to the Deaf-Hearing Communication Center in Swarthmore, near where I live. I enrolled in sign language classes, even though Valencia does not use sign language, by the way, but still, it's part, you know, I wanna get as much information as I can get. And I also connected with Gina Oliva, who is an author who has written books about...she's deaf and she's written many books about her experience. I reached out to her, I met her, she read the manuscript, someone at Gallaudet read the manuscript. Harper sent the manuscript to someone. So it went through all these.

You know, first, I had to write it for them to be able to read it, obviously, and to write it, I had to do all the due diligence that we're talking about. And I had to be willing to ask Gina...I mean, you know, thanks, so fortunate to have Gina who was willing to answer any of my questions, even the ones that made me look, you know, potentially stupid or underinformed, which I was underinformed, by the way. So you know, I had to do all that to even start to write her story.

Mary: That's a high bar, I would say, that you held yourself to. Classes, even the sign language classes that were not directly relevant. You had several layers of feedback from people within the community that could speak to that lived experience, both from your publisher and that you searched for independently. At that point, did you feel prepared?

Erin: I felt prepared and I felt as confident as any writer does, they write a book. But I was still nervous, and when the book came out and I was still waiting what the reception would be. And luckily, it was embraced, and of course, that made me very happy. But I think, had I not done all of those things and been overprepared, you know, I think sometimes we think, "Oh, research, I'll just do a Google search," but that's not even close to being enough. You have to go out and talk to people face to face. You have to ask questions that might make you look ill-informed, or you know, you have to be willing to know what your own stereotypes are. And another thing that I often wonder about writers is sometimes I feel like we're compelled to write other people's experiences because we don't necessarily look inward and value our own lived experience that we already have. And what I mean by that is, you know, before my first book came out, a lot of the books that I was writing had white characters who looked like the characters that I grew up reading. And at some point, I thought, you know, "Maybe I should write about what I actually know as a Filipino girl growing up in the South and write about that," you know. And I think sometimes writers forget to do that. We forget to use ourselves as resources, you know. I don't know if it's because we don't see our own lived experiences interesting enough as other people's lived experience. Sometimes we skip that step as well, if that makes any sense.

Mary: It does. And I think one of the points that you're making that has sort of lit up social media and the cultural discourse right now is this rigorous honesty and rigorous inner work that some people are afraid to do or some people feel that they don't have to do. Because I think you're right, we all tend to have a pretty level-headed summation of ourselves and how we're doing. We tend to feel like, "Wait, we're doing pretty well." But what I hear you saying is that really poking around at every assumption. I hear intentions at what you're hoping to get out of telling your particular story, that's a huge piece of it before the research part even kicks in.

Erin: Yes, definitely. And I think where it gets dicey and where it gets very tricky is, you know, everyone's lived experience is very, very nuanced. So if you're centering an experience that you're not familiar with, it's very easy to miss those nuances of what it means to live every single day within the shoes of, you know, fill-in-the-blank community. You know, my lived experience every single day as a woman or as a Filipino woman or as woman in the South or whatever it may be is going to be very different than someone else's lived experience every day, and there's all these nuances. So I think it comes down to, from a craft level as writers, you're kind of at a disadvantage when you're writing outside your lived experience. If you're centering someone else's lived experience, you're at a disadvantage craft-wise because it could be difficult to create truly textured three-dimensional characters because you don't have access to those nuances of what it means to live that life every day. But then, on the other side, apart from craft, just from the big question that we're asking, like who's allowed to write what story, you're being held to this high accountability that's difficult to achieve, not because of ill intention but just because there's a lot of things that we miss if we haven't lived that every day, if that makes sense.

Mary: This calls to mind, so for "The Good Story Podcast," I interview with middle grade writer Jake Burt, who is white, and he had this manuscript where he had decided he was setting it in Southern California, he decided to make his protagonist Hispanic, and then he kinda got a few kickbacks from his publisher in terms of feedback from a sensitivity reader. And he did a lot of soul searching. You know, he hit the pause button, and he did an experiment in that he removed all of the details that pertained to the character's culture. And this was a protagonist. I was gonna ask you about kind of protagonist versus secondary characters. And it took him three hours to remove everything that sort of spoke to that piece of the protagonist, and he decided to recast it as a white protagonist, I think, in part because he realized that some of these details, that texture that you're talking about, that isn't necessarily circus level. In his manuscript, it had come across as potentially kinda superficial. If he was able to get rid of it that easily, he decided, "Well, that makes the decision for me."

Erin: Yes.

Mary: To speak to kind of that level and depth of detail and just insight that somebody going outside of their lane may not naturally have.

Erin: Yeah. And you know what, one thing that I always ask my students is, and this is good whether you're writing in your lane or outside your lane or whatever, is, why are you writing the story? Why does it have to be you? In other words, why did the character...for example, and I'm sure they asked him this, you know, why is the character Hispanic? And if the answer is, "Oh, because I need a diverse cast," that's not an answer, right? There needs to be something or some reason why you're the one to tell the story, right. So trying to think of some good examples here, okay. Whatever we write our characters, and I'm very much a character-driven author, all my books start with character and everything I do comes from character, what is it like to be...for example, I'll use my own book for an example.

So my first book "Blackbird Fly" is about a girl who's 12, and she's Filipino, and she's growing up in the South, in South Louisiana, in a very homogeneous community, and she's the only Asian at her school. And she finds out that she's on the list of the ugliest girls in school. She finds out she's number three on this list. And the book is very much about her, you know, as middle grade often is reclaiming her identity and learning to be proud of who she is. It would have been very difficult, right, for someone who was not a 12-year-old Filipino girl in a small town in South Louisiana to write that book, right, because there were so many levels to not just the overt racism that Apple, the main character, experiences, that most of us can recognize. Most of us recognize overt racism, right. We all know what that is. It's the covert, the nuanced racism that Apple experiences that provides the layers that a story needs to truly be authentic. And if you have not lived that nuanced experience, you may not be as familiar with the covert, the microaggressions, right, the microaggressions that someone in a marginalized community experiences every day. You're just not gonna be familiar with it. And you know, you won't be familiar with the foods or the way Apple's mother would speak to her or the cultural, what it feels like to be culturally distant from your parents and what is it like when you have a parent whose idea of raising you is completely different than the "American way" of raising kids, you know.

It's all those things that make our characters authentic and create characters that readers identify with across, you know, ethnicity and race and religion and all that stuff. And when you don't have access to all those layers, it could be difficult to manufacture them. And it can be even difficult to say, you know, let's say someone wanted to write a book about a 12-year-old Filipino girl in South Louisiana, and they decided to interview me as their research, right. How am I going to explain, "Okay, this is what it's like every day when you're walking around?" There's things that I wouldn't even be aware of to tell someone, and there's things that we're not even aware of until we start writing, you know. And for me, write what you know very much means write your emotional truth. And our identities, all our various identities that we have, racial identity, ethnic identity, personhood identity, sexual orientation, all that stuff, informs that emotional truth and resonance. So you know, it's all connected. I don't know if that answered your question, but.

Mary: I think just those examples, especially, you know, coming from a different culture, well, what's it like to be an Americanized kid or a kid growing up in America but also having one foot in the home culture and the heritage. You know, there's a lot there that you're completely right. No matter how diligent our research, you wouldn't be able to communicate all of those layers necessarily in an hour-long interview or in a sensitivity reader report.

Erin: Yes, definitely. And that's why I feel like it's different with protagonists versus secondary characters and why it was important for me that, even though Valencia's outside my lived experience, and of course, even our secondary characters, I have to be completely authentic, I would never purport to write a book about what is it like for Valencia to be mainstreamed in school every day or what is it like for Valencia to live with her parents every day. Although there are scenes with her parents, it's not the heart, the meat of the book, and I would never wanna set out to write that book, because I know that I'm not the person to write that book.

Mary: You felt confident or confident enough, you know, like you said, as if writers ever feel 100% confident. You felt confident enough in Valencia as a secondary character where her experience being deaf is not the main "point" or "issue" in the book, it's not necessarily the driver of the story. You felt confident enough with her as a secondary character, whereas if the story was her story, as a protagonist, you would not...that's not what you would have written.

Erin: No, I felt like that would have been a very...I would not have been comfortable writing, you know, about that and about even going near the controversy within the deaf community that you spoke of earlier or even dipping my toe on that, I don't feel like. I would not have written that book, no. And same with Kaori, because Kaori is Japanese-American, but that's not really what the book is about, you know. It's not about her being Japanese-American. It is a lot about Virgil being Filipino and living in a Filipino household. I can write about that, right, because I understand what that looks like.

Mary: So going back to this idea of the diverse cast for the sake of diversity. So let's say we have a white writer, and for the reasons that you mentioned, they've decided because of their lived experience to make their protagonist white. But that being said, I think it would be a huge disservice to a book, especially one for young readers, to not represent a diverse cast in the book, because that's just not the world that we live in, right. And we want a kid of color or a kid coming from a different lived experience to come to the page and recognize somebody on that page. And so the white writer thinks, you know, not to seem mercenary or seem too gross about it, but I do think that there is a cultural awareness that, "Gosh, I should include a diverse cast one way or another in my book, especially as a white writer." I've heard that concern from many, many, many white writer clients who say, "Okay, I do wanna make my book diverse, but I don't wanna make it diverse in a way that feels like I'm checking boxes." That's kind of a tough place to be in when we think about how to thoughtfully diversify, if you will, a cast of characters to best reflect the world that we live in. How does a writer even begin approaching making those decisions?

Erin: That is very tricky.

Mary: You're floundering through that question.

Erin: Yeah. It's even difficult to figure out the questions, much as the answers. So this is what I think. I think because characters are so important to me, I'm coming at this from a perspective of a very character-driven author, and one thing I've learned over the years is that everyone writes their stories differently. So if you're a plot-driven author and you think of a great plot and then you populate it with characters, your mind, I can tell you right now, works totally differently from mine. So everything for me comes from characters first, and so I spend months...and I can only answer this question from my perspective, and hopefully you can [inaudible 00:27:39].

Mary: That's why you're here.

Erin: Yes. So I spend...my process is I spend months thinking of my characters. I usually start with one character. Usually, one character comes into my head, and he or she just refuses to go anywhere. So I keep staying with that character. And from that character comes the story, and from that story comes other characters. And this process, it's months in my brain before I ever write anything down. I never come up with an idea and think, "Oh, I'm gonna write that down," or I wake up in the morning and say, "I'm gonna write that down." I never do that. I always let it percolate in my head. And then, after months and months, once I have this very three-dimensional story in my brain, then I sit down and write a synopsis, and everything that's been in my brain, I put down on a piece of paper in a synopsis. So what that has to do with story is, I mean, characters is the way I approach characters is whenever they're in my head and they're populating the world and they come up three-dimensionally in my brain, they arrive how they arrive. And because of the way my brain works, they will arrive, and they may arrive deaf, they may arrive Hispanic, they may arrive...however they arrive in my brain is how they arrive, because I'm already...I don't know how to say this without making it sound like I'm so woke. I'm already astutely aware. Sorry, no, I'm just kidding.

Mary: Even the real world and then you just populate it the way the world is.

Erin: My imagination is populated by the way I see the world, and my world has...I have diverse friend groups, I've worked in diverse workplaces, I lived diverse neighborhoods. So the characters come to me as they come as the real world reflects. Now, that being said, I'm working on a book right now that takes place in a very, very small town. There's only 12 7th graders in the whole school on the bayous of Louisiana. And all those characters, I can tell you, arrived at me right because, in this small town, trust me, it's not gonna be like diversity, you know what I mean. It's gonna be homogeneous. So sometimes they arrive homogeneous if that's what the setting called for. But one thing with "Hello, Universe" was, you know, I definitely didn't sit there and think, "You know what, I should have a deaf character, and I should also have a Japanese character, and then I'll have a white character." I don't do that. So however they're in the book is how they arrived in my brain. So it's hard for me to think about how to diversify cast because that's just on how my brain works, so I don't even know if that was helpful in any way.

Mary: No. I mean, I have to keep asking this question because I get it so much, and I think that the kind of the extension of this stay in your lane idea could be that we end up sometimes underrepresenting a diverse cast. You know, if people are only staying in their lane, right, that's not reflective of reality, and that does a disservice to readers who may not find themselves represented on pages. I'm talking about white writers, specifically. But at the same time, I do see manuscripts where we have a very ethnic name, for example, and it seems like the writer is like, "Okay, I did it. You know, I sort of diversified the cast, but there's got to be more to it, you know."

Erin: And it's gotta be too, like, this is another thing, Mary, that's important to me that I see a lot in manuscripts that I make notes on all the time is, too often, writers think of their books as, like, the stage and their characters are the chess pieces that they're moving around the chess board to make them do what they want. And the problem is writers, time and time again, I see this in so many manuscripts that I read, the characters are moving from here to there, but it doesn't feel like I'm embodying the scene in any real way. Like, I'm not walking around in this character's shoes. And I think the problem as writers, we're thinking of, "Okay, this is my plot, and I have to get my character to do A, B, and C, and that's what they're gonna do in this chapter." But they don't think about what's it actually like to character Mary Kole in this cafeteria in eighth grade, sitting by herself at lunch. [inaudible 00:32:38] by herself at lunch. Like, what does that actually feel like in a very real way, you know? And it's about being a storyteller and not a reporter. And I think too many manuscripts are like reporting events, but they're not telling me a story, you know. I mean, I've read manuscripts that are in first person that's 50,000 words, and even though it's in first person, there's no voice. I don't know what it's like to be this character even though I've been in first person with a character that's 50,000 words. I still don't know what they actually feel or think, see them doing things. And I think...

Mary: You've brought up so many things, Erin. I hate to interrupt you, but I think that the interesting thing here is that you feel like some writers have an agenda and sort of at whatever cost sort of stamped that agenda over the characters.

Erin: Yes.

Mary: It sounds like you, from everything...you haven't even talked about your process really all that much, but it sounds like, from everything I've heard today so far, you sort of just show up and listen for these people to tell you who they are. They sort of plop out fully formed, and you sort of you take a bit more of a backseat. Would that be accurate?

Erin: Yes, totally accurate. In fact, that's why I don't write anything down for many months, because the moment I write it down, I've taken agency over the story already. So I don't write anything down until I'm ready to put the things on paper, but first I have to know what to put on paper. So one question I get a lot is, "Well, what if you forget something?" And maybe this is not a good answer, but I just say, "If I forget it, it wasn't worth remembering." Because I remember the important stuff about my characters that they...you know what I mean. Just like if I met someone and they tell me, you know, "My husband died last year, and I planted a tomato garden." Well, I might forget the tomato garden, but I'm not gonna forget the important thing that they told, right, you know. I'm gonna remember stuff that matters at the end of the day, in my view. So I feel like if writers took that approach where they actually envision and embody seen in their character's eyes, I think once you do that, tokenizing of character becomes...you become less inclined to say, "Oh, I'm gonna plop a black character here, and I'm gonna have my Hispanic character over here," because you're not thinking of them in that way. If your brain is thinking it through your characters, you're viewing the world as your character, and they won't appear as tokenized cardboard cutouts. They'll appear as three-dimensional humans, you know, or creatures or whatever they are in your book. We forget that they're supposed to be flesh and blood beings that we're writing about. They're not just words on paper, right. The goal is to make them real.

Mary: So I think a big takeaway from this whole thing on topic and not would be to just shut up and listen rather than...you know. Because I think, earlier, we were talking about, you know, so many people think that they have an understanding, so many people think that they're at a certain level. Maybe they're not. Maybe we open ourselves up to the idea that we don't know everything going into the character creation process, even about the character, regardless of, you know, race, gender identity, all of that. But all these other details of character, we could just listen a little bit more as we're getting to know them.

Erin: Yes. And that goes for the...actually, that goes for ourselves and the industry itself, you know. If you're someone who....you know, I think a lot of people approach this cancel culture as it's been called or this, "Oh, well, we should be able to write whatever we want," if you come at the issue with that defensive nature instead of listening and actually reading what people are actually saying and thinking about it, you've already messed up kind of. Because it's about forgetting...don't get defensive, forget about all that stuff, just actually listen to what people are saying, and maybe you'll learn something. It's very hard to learn when you're on the defensive, right, because you don't wanna listen.

Mary: And that's what I think is, you know, I've heard it said, whether it was on social media or NPR, you know. Every time that we touch this topic, it's so incendiary, because the immediate assumption is, "Oh, I'm being called racist," or "I'm being called, you know, I'm being called one of these -ist derogatory words if I don't do exactly the right thing." And I think that that can shut down a lot of this inquiry that you're advocating for and this humility that you're advocating for. Like you said defensiveness sort of, you've already lost when that's the mode you're coming from, but it's almost hard not to, because people, as we keep coming back to this idea, people like to think highly of themselves, as they should, but maybe this position of knowing can really get in the way.

Erin: Yes, definitely. You know, instead of being angry and saying, "I'm not racist," instead of going there, maybe stop and think, "Okay, what did I say? And why was it taken that way?" You know. And I think it's also important to know that it's not on us to tell someone out when they can or cannot be offended by something, especially for that part of the community that they're a part of. So I think that's an important part of it as well. Like, "Oh, why are you getting offended? That's not what that person meant." Well, you know? And I mean, it's not up to us to decide, "This should offend and this should not offend you, person in another community." I mean, like, that's not how it should go ever.

Mary: So I think to really address this thoughtfully and to sort of participate, again, thoughtfully in this publishing culture in our larger culture in our society today, I think just this idea of inquiry and self- awareness and just trying to examine ourselves, examine the world, and do better and be better, basically.

Erin: Yes. And read books outside of your community as well written by authors from that community. Especially if you're thinking about writing a book, you know, outside your lane, so to speak, you definitely should be aware of the writers that are actually in that lane writing books about that community. I think that's important as well. So, yeah, definitely.

Mary: One last general question and then we'll turn it over to the group. But what do you make of this disposition that if we do, however, as white writers or writers in the dominant culture, if we do represent a character outside of our lived experience, whether race or gender identity or anything like that, that we take potentially a spot from an underrepresented writer from telling that story. I know this goes back to the much bigger question. But do you think it's an either/or situation in the larger publishing landscape right now?

Erin: You know, I think, oh, boy, that's a complicated one as well. Here's the thing that I would urge writers to think about, no matter what book they're writing. It all goes back to the question of, why are you writing this book and why are you the one to write it? So I say that to say, let's say I decide to write a story about a trans character, and I am not trans. I am cisgender. And you ask me why am I writing this, and I tell you, "Well, my best friend is trans, and it hurts me to see what he goes through, and I wanna write a story that shows, you know, all these wrongs and exposes." Okay, that's a noble cause. But then the second question is, why are you the person to write it? Why are you, Erin? And I would not have an answer for that question. Because the truth is there are many other writers who could and would write that story better with more authenticity, with more nuance, with more respect to the community, writers who are within that community. So I don't necessarily think of it as taking up a spot, although there's an argument that can certainly be made for that. I think of it like even before you even write the book, you have to be able to answer those two questions. Can someone write it better than you? And if the answer is yes, I mean, us, writers, we all think someone could write anything better than us, but if someone can write this story better than you, you know, with more authority and more honesty, then maybe they're the ones who should be writing it and you should be writing your own truths. So that's how I think of it.

Mary: Thank you for fielding some really complex nuanced and honestly difficult questions for us.

Erin: Thank you. It's a lot of fun. So happy writing, everyone.

Mary: Thank you so much for joining us for "The Good Story Podcast." My name is Mary Kole. "The Good Story Podcast" is made possible by my team, Abby Pickus, Amy Holland, Amy Wilson, Jen Petro-Roy, Jenna Van Rooy, Kristen Overman, Paige Polzin, and audio and video wizardry from Steve Reiss. You can find us online at goodstorycompany.com, goodstorypodcast.com. I'm at marykole.com. And here is to a good story.

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