5 Writing Tips for Writing Characters From Different Cultures (Without Getting It Wrong)
Fiction has always required its writers to imagine their way into lives unlike their own. That is, in many ways, the whole point. But the modern writer faces a particular version of this challenge with particular stakes: how do you write a character from a cultural background different to yours — with the depth and specificity that character deserves — without causing real harm, and without producing a portrayal that readers from that culture will recognise as hollow?
This is not a question with a single clean answer. But it is a question with better and worse approaches. The five tips below are drawn from both the craft of fiction and the experience of writing and researching across cultural lines. Each comes with a practical exercise or test, because good intentions matter less than good practice.
These tips apply whether you are writing a Malagasy character, a Ghanaian character, a Japanese character, or any character whose cultural context you did not grow up inside. The specific examples here draw on Malagasy culture, but the principles are universal.
Tip 1: Research the Specifics, Not the Stereotype
The problem with writing "a Malagasy character" based on a Wikipedia article and a single novel is not that the writer is lazy — it is that the research produces a composite, and composites produce stereotypes. A character assembled from general impressions of a culture will feel general. Readers from that culture will notice immediately.
The solution is specificity, and specificity requires going to primary sources. Not the travel guide. Not the documentary. Memoirs written from inside a culture. Personal diaries, where they exist. Journalism by writers who are themselves from the culture they are reporting on. Oral histories. Academic ethnography, used carefully. And, where at all possible: real people.
This last point deserves emphasis. Books about a culture are always mediated. Real people — friends, contacts, interview subjects, community members — carry knowledge that has never been written down and never will be. Approaching this kind of research with genuine curiosity and appropriate humility is both ethically right and practically effective.
A practical exercise: Choose three ordinary days in your character's life — not dramatic days, not plot-relevant days, but ordinary Tuesdays. Research in detail what your character would eat for breakfast, what sounds they would wake up to, what financial worries or administrative irritations might occupy their mind. What would they watch on television, or listen to on the way to work? What would a difficult conversation with a family member sound like in their language? This level of granularity will not all appear on the page, but it will change what does.
Tip 2: Give Your Character an Interior Life Beyond Their Culture
One of the most common failures in cross-cultural characterisation is the character who exists only in relation to their cultural identity. Everything they do, think, and feel is filtered through their ethnicity or nationality. They become a representative of their culture rather than a person who happens to belong to it.
Real people from any culture also have petty grievances that have nothing to do with their heritage. They have romantic feelings, career anxieties, opinions about music, embarrassing memories from their teenage years, and strong views about what constitutes a good cup of tea. A Malagasy character can be homesick and also be annoyed by a specific colleague. They can carry complex feelings about their family's history and also be inexplicably invested in a reality television programme.
The test here is simple, and it is worth applying rigorously: if you removed all the cultural markers from your character — the specific foods, the language, the references to home — would a fully realised person remain? If the answer is no, your character's interiority needs more work.
A practical exercise: Write a scene in which your cross-cultural character does something entirely mundane with no cultural dimension whatsoever — misses a bus, burns dinner, gets into a trivial argument about something inconsequential. Write it without inserting any cultural "lesson" or thematic resonance. If this feels impossible, that is diagnostic information.
Tip 3: Let the Character Be the Expert
There is a particular failure mode in cross-cultural fiction that is so common it has become a recognisable trope: the scene in which a character explains their own culture to a white or Western character, ostensibly as dialogue but functionally as exposition. "In my culture, we believe that..." is the giveaway phrase. Real people do not narrate their own cultural context to others unprompted. They live inside it.
The problem is not that the information is wrong. The problem is the mechanism. When a character is positioned as a cultural explainer, their function in the narrative becomes educating the reader rather than existing as a person. It is also, invariably, less interesting than the alternative.
The alternative is to let cultural detail emerge through action and internal thought. Instead of having a character explain the significance of a particular ritual, show them performing it — with whatever feelings they actually have about it, which may include impatience, grief, boredom, or joy. Instead of explaining the meaning of a piece of music, let the character simply hear it, and let their internal response carry the weight.
This is how members of any culture actually move through their world: from the inside, not as observers of themselves. Writing it this way is both more accurate and more interesting.
Tip 4: Name Things Correctly
There is a version of cross-cultural writing that gestures towards specificity without committing to it. A character eats "a spiced stew." They walk through "a local market." They observe "a traditional ceremony." This hedging is understandable — the writer does not want to get it wrong — but it produces something worse than an error. It produces vagueness, and vagueness reads as disinterest.
Name the dish. Name the market. Name the ceremony, the song, the tree, the road. If a character eats ravitoto in Madagascar, call it ravitoto. If they are travelling along a specific route through the highlands, use the real geography. This requires research, and the research is worth doing.
On the question of language: including words and phrases from a character's native language, used naturally in dialogue and internal thought, with enough context that meaning can be inferred, is one of the most effective ways to make cultural specificity feel lived-in rather than performed. The key is confidence. Do not over-explain. Characters do not pause to define the words they use in their own minds. Let the reader do a small amount of work.
The signal that correctly naming things sends is significant. Readers from the culture you are writing about will notice immediately whether you have done this work. Getting it right is a form of respect. Getting it wrong — even through vagueness — tells those readers something about how much you valued their experience.
Tip 5: Work With Someone From That Culture
Sensitivity readers are a professional service, and a valuable one. But the frame of "sensitivity reading" sometimes obscures what is actually being asked: a subject-matter expert is reviewing your work to help you avoid errors you could not have caught alone. This is standard practice in many other forms of writing, and it should be standard in fiction.
This is not about seeking permission to tell a story. It is about getting the story right. The distinction matters. You do not need a Malagasy reader's permission to write a Malagasy character. You do need to be open to the possibility that a Malagasy reader will see things in your manuscript that you cannot.
Budget for this. Sensitivity reading is skilled professional work and should be compensated accordingly. Writing Diversely is a useful starting point for finding qualified readers, along with community networks in the specific culture you are writing about.
What to do when a sensitivity reader flags something you disagree with: sit with it. Consider the possibility that your instinct to defend your choice is itself worth examining. You may ultimately decide to keep what you have written — but the decision should be made after genuine reflection, not before it.
A useful final filter: Read the relevant scenes and ask honestly whether a reader from the culture you are writing about would feel seen by this portrayal, or would feel othered by it. These are not the same thing, and the difference is usually perceptible.
Writing Across Cultures Is Worth Doing
Writing across cultural lines is one of fiction's most demanding tasks and one of its most important. The risks are real — cultural missteps cause genuine harm, and they also undermine the literary goal of creating characters who feel fully human. But the alternative — a fiction that only ever looks inward, at the cultures its writers already inhabit — is a diminished fiction.
For a deeper look at why Malagasy culture specifically offers such rich literary territory, read my post on writing authentically about cultural heritage. And if you want to see these principles in action, the novel itself is available at the store on my website.
