What’s your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?
I really don’t have a favorite culture to write for. In my fantasy, horror, and science fiction stories, there isn’t any one particular culture/race (vampires, werewolves, demons, spirits, ect) that I tend to write more of. I’m kind of all over the place.
If anything, with my drama’s, you could say that I write more about “African-American Culture”, in a way. Mainly because most of my characters, or at least my lead characters, are African-American and that’s because I’m African-American. I like racial diversity in my stories. You’ll never find a story of mine with an “all Black cast” because I don’t live in an “All Black World”. So, unless a story calls for it, with good reason, it’ll not be written my me.
With that said, I don’t consider my stories to be particularly “Black/African-American Stories” either, not that there’s really anything wrong with it, I guess. I just don’t like the limitation of the label. Unfortunately, that label can throw a TON of potential readers off. Gee, I wonder why? Anyway!
I write stories first and foremost, period, and the characters in my stories just happen to be Black. That’s how I see it.
scribereglyph 
I agree, most of my characters are African American too in my WIP because i just happen to be African American, but I do have other races in the story as well. In a lot of my short stories, I may not even describe the characters, giving the reader the opportunity to “fill in the blank”, so to speak.
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Yes, I’ve done that as well. In my short story “Mother’s Little Helper” I don’t believe I ever really described how the characters looked, so the reader could envision whoever they wanted in the roles.
i wonder if that’s something you can only get away with in short stories?
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One of my favorite authors is Eric Jerome Dickey and he has a four-part book series about a contract killer named Gideon. Dickey is African American and, for the most part, his main characters are usually African American. In this series, he never reveals Gideon’s ethnicity. There is a reason for this, but, of course, I don’t want to give that away. He does describe his physical attributes because Gideon is the most feared hitman in the world and can kick everybody’s ass…LOL!! You’re left wondering what race Gideon is even though you know he’s handsome and ripped!
The saga is primarily told from Gideon’s POV and Dickey does give pretty good descriptions of all the other characters, revealing race and nationality. Since he’s an international contract killer, each book takes the reader to a different international setting.
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Wow, that series really interesting. I’ll will have to check it out. I haven’t read much, if anything, of Erick Jerome Dicky’s work.
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