1. Research is only the beginning, and barely even that.

Almost every lecture/essay/blog/panel I've seen about writing the other boils down to this single takeaway: "Do your homework." And then, the unspoken inference continues, everything will be all right; all those complicated, impossible puzzle pieces of privilege and power will fall into place. Except no. Writing about people who have a different experience or identity from our own is not a simple narrative challenge, and it doesn't have a simple solution. Plenty of writers who are "experts" on a given culture still create miserable trite stereotypes when it comes to fashioning that expertise into actual characters. The roots of Westernized research practice include eugenics, vivisections, forced sterilizations, and the often dehumanizing gaze of anthropology. This is not to say "all research is bad," but rather we have to be aware of the complex, often painful histories we're taking part in so that we don't repeat that trauma.

Here's American Horror Story writer James Wong: "We had done a lot of research on dark magic and obviously, there wasn't a lot from life to pull from because none of that is true [laughs]. But when we did research, we found out a lot about fertility symbols, and we wound up mixing and matching that stuff to create that ceremony." Regardless of how you feel about American Horror Story, here is an excellent example of how research is only step one. Having done "a lot" of research, the writing team then opted to throw it all into a potpourri mix of fertility ceremonies and come up with something new. Notice that the very idea that any of these beliefs have truth to them is laughable to Mr. Wong. A mixing of cultural elements can be done well, but when combined, as it usually is, with a blatant disdain for the belief systems at play, the result is a standard mashup, neither here nor there, synthetic version of sacred ceremony that is rooted in racist and disrespectful tropes.