Many fiction writers, when they write a story that includes a marginalized character, ask a member of the marginalized group to look the story over before publication. In fiction writing circles, this process is usually caused “sensitivity reading.” A friend of mine who writes fiction, however, has started calling it “expert reading.”
This change in language is simple, but I love it. An expert reader makes stories accurate. A sensitivity reader, conversely, makes stories inoffensive.
Fiction writers use expert readers all the time, for a variety of subjects:
A doctor to make sure that you’re accurately describing what an infected sword wound looks like.
A gun owner to check that you haven’t described a rifle when you mean a shotgun.
A historian to brainstorm with you different ways that a society’s class system might work.
A physicist to write you some technobabble about spaceships.
A barista to help you really capture that “I closed last night and opened this morning and if the customer asks for a custom latte I will feed them into a woodchipper” feeling.
A person who lives in Utah, if you made the mistake of setting your story in Utah despite never having actually been there and now you’re staring at a keyboard going “…Mormons?”
If you’re writing a story that incorporates medicine or guns or physics or Utah, and you aren’t an expert in medicine or guns or physics or Utah, it’s helpful to show your story to someone who knows more and ask them where you got it wrong. And if you’re writing a story that incorporates, say, Jews or lesbians or wheelchair users or full-service sex workers or Southeast Asians, and you aren’t a member of one of those groups, it’s helpful to show your story to a group member and ask them where you got it wrong.
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