The stories we tell have power. We tell stories to impart knowledge—to show each other how the world works, what dangers to be wary of, and what moral convictions to stand firm in. Stories are not just fluffy entertainment to pass the time. They are modes of communicating social values, imperatives, and worldviews. Stories are incredibly effective at communicating these messages, often without the listener even being aware of how the story is influencing their worldview. As a result, stories have an incredible power to influence people. That power can be used for good, and it can be used for ill. And, despite how trite this saying has become, it’s still true: with great power comes great responsibility. We, as authors, have an obligation to our readers to write responsibly.
Sadly, a story’s impact exists independently from the author’s intent. At the end of the day, once a book is out of the author’s hands and in the hands of the reader, the author is dead. The only thing that will impact the reader is the story itself, not the author’s intent. Since so many of our most harmful (and false) social narratives are passed down unconsciously, it is so easy to unintentionally write a harmful story.
As an editor who works with authors at early stages in their writing, I’ve seen this fact firsthand. I’ve seen how easy it is for people to rely on stereotypical and harmful tropes to establish characters and plot points. When I flag such issues, it’s clear that the vast majority of authors do not intend to rely on harmful stereotypes in their writing. But these insidious stereotypes often creep in nonetheless. I cannot emphasize this enough: it is so easy to write a harmful story.
If you’re an author, that fact should scare you. Not enough to make you stop writing, but enough to really motivate you to think critically about your own stories and to put in the work to write responsibly. And writing responsibly will take work and conscious effort. When we write, our instinct is to build our story off of narrative structures that we’ve seen before. That’s how genre works, that’s how culture works, and that’s how systemic discrimination works.
It takes effort—conscious, critical, and self‑aware effort—to disentangle constructive cultural narratives from the harmful tropes that we’ve been inundated with. As authors, we have a moral obligation to do that work. Writing responsibly means dedicating ourselves to not perpetuate harm through our stories.
But where do we start? How do we actually manage to build this self-awareness and write responsibly? This process starts with a healthy dose of both humility and self-compassion.
Building Self‑Awareness through Self-Compassion
Unconscious biases are just that: unconscious. They are weeds rooted into the darkest corners of our minds that are incredibly difficult to completely pull out. Everyone has some degree of unconscious bias about groups they don’t belong to. You almost certainly have unconscious biases. I certainly do. These are uncomfortable facts—deeply, deeply uncomfortable facts.
In our modern society, discrimination has become socially unacceptable, and the vast majority of people believe that it is immoral to judge people and discriminate against them on the basis of their identity. In other words, the vast majority of people do not want to have these biases. Yet wanting them to be gone is not enough to make our biases disappear. To address our biases, we have to look at them head-on.
We, as humans, are really bad at acknowledging the potential for darkness within ourselves. We all desperately need to believe that we are good people. Whenever we face evidence that challenges our belief that we are good people, we experience a deep sense of discomfort. In response, our brain kicks in with a host of defence mechanisms to alleviate that discomfort. Psychologists call this process cognitive dissonance. To learn how to write responsibly, you need to learn how to manage this discomfort.
What Cognitive Dissonance Has to Do with Writing Responsibly
Here’s how cognitive dissonance works:
Cognitive dissonance [is] the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: they reject, explain away, or avoid the new information; persuade themselves that no conflict really exists; reconcile the differences; or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in their conceptions of the world and of themselves.
Encyclopedia Britannica Online
When you read that “You almost certainly have unconscious biases,” you probably had an instinctual negative response to it. Maybe you suddenly wanted to stop reading this post. Maybe you shrugged it off, thinking to yourself “most people are like that, but I’m better than most people.” Maybe you thought to yourself, “sure I have some biases, but they don’t actually influence how I treat people.” Maybe you rejected that statement entirely or didn’t let yourself think about it too much. I certainly found it difficult to explicitly write that I have unconscious biases.
These defence mechanisms serve to protect us from the pain of guilt and shame. But if we give into them, they can make it impossible for us to address problems and become better people. If you can’t acknowledge a problem, you can’t fix the problem. If you believe you cannot make a specific mistake, then you will never guard yourself against making that mistake. Refusing to monitor yourself for possible pitfalls will actually make you more likely to fall into them. We still need to quell that cognitive dissonance—that horrible feeling of discomfort we experience when looking at a difficult truth about ourselves. We just need to do it in a way where we can still push ourselves to be better people.
Combating Cognitive Dissonance with Self-Compassion
So, to root out our unconscious biases, we need to start with calming down our cognitive dissonance with some self‑compassion. Yes, we all have unconscious biases. And that is okay! What is not okay is allowing those biases to influence our behaviour. Biases by themselves do not make us bad people. Biased behaviour is what makes us bad people. As Sirius Black said, “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on.”
Yes, our biases are a problem, and yes, the best way to stop unintentionally biased behaviour is to root out our unconscious biases. But that process is hard and takes time. In the meantime, consciously working to avoid biased behaviour is enough to make you a good person.
As a writer, it is okay to have unconscious biases. What is not okay is allowing those biases to shape your story. Consciously working to avoid harmful tropes is enough to make you a responsible writer. So, once you’ve got that self-compassion in place—where you can acknowledge your own biases without cognitive dissonance completely overwhelming you—you can actually go ahead and figure out what those biases are.
Identifying Your Biases
Since unconscious biases are unconscious, how do we actually pinpoint what our biases are? It’s a tricky problem, but psychologists have already figured this part out. They’ve created implicit bias tests that are incredibly easy to take, reliable, and highly specific. You can use them to pinpoint not only what unconscious biases you have but also how deeply engrained those biases are. Harvard University has set up a website that makes these tests free to all.
So, to pinpoint your biases, all you need to do is visit Harvard’s Project Implicit website and start taking some tests. But keep in mind that, while these tests are not too time consuming, they can be mentally draining to take. Project Implicit has a bunch of different tests for different people groups. If you try to take all of them in one sitting, it’s going to be a lot. So pace yourself, give yourself breaks, and focus on the tests that are most relevant to your situation and current creative writing project.
Once you’ve figured out your biases, then you can move on to addressing how they may come up in your story.
Learning How Biases Often Express Themselves in Stories
Understanding your weaknesses is the first step to building strength. Now that you know what parts to focus on, you can start the workout.
In fiction, unconscious biases most often express themselves through tropes, which are deeply connected to stereotypes. Tropes are storytelling patterns. If you unconsciously associate women with meekness, you might gravitate toward writing female characters as secondary characters with very little narrative agency. One meek female character within the context of a diverse female cast will not create a pattern. But if all of your female characters are meek and dependent on the kindness of strangers, then you’re creating a pattern.
Humans are built to identify patterns and interpret meaning in them. Once you create a pattern in your writing, your readers will instinctually find meaning in that pattern. In this case, if you write all your female characters as meek and dependent, then you will be communicating to the reader that all women are inherently meek and dependent. These kinds of messages are dangerous, regardless of whether the author consciously intended to create the narrative pattern or not. Again, with great power comes great responsibility.
There are so many different specific tropes out there that communicate harmful overgeneralizations about different groups of people. Every harmful stereotype and trope is worthy of its own full blog post, so I won’t try to give you an insufficient crash course on stereotypical tropes here. Instead, I’ll send you to places where you can learn more.
Additional Resources for Writing Responsibly
To start off, the organization Writing the Other is an incredible online resource for writers who want to learn how to write responsibly. They offer books and online courses and webinars on so many different facets of writing diverse stories with sensitivity and care.
Writing the Other also has a wonderful list of free resources about creating inclusive fiction and specific tropes according to different identity categories. These free resources are a great place to start. You can find them here.
In addition to Writing the Other’s compilation, here are some of the resources that I have found to be helpful:
- The Micropedia, an online encyclopedia of common discriminatory microaggressions.
- Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell.
- Rowen Ellis’s channel, including Why Are Disney Villains Gay / Queer?, The Evolution Of Queerbaiting: From Queercoding to Queercatching, and Debunking Asexual and Aromantic Myths with Alice Oseman!.
- Jen Campbell’s channel, including Let’s Talk: Villains and Disfigurement.
Also, keep in mind that while all stereotypes are tropes, not all tropes are stereotypes. Tropes are narrative patterns, and we need narrative patterns to create stories. Again, this process is about disentangling the benign tropes from the harmful ones.
Facing our unconscious biases is hard. It’s also incredibly important. You don’t need to beat yourself up about the fact that you have them. We all do. We just need to work together to overcome them. As authors, that means putting in the effort to write responsibly. I hope my thoughts in this post have ultimately helped you in this vital endeavour.
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