Character Diversity

There are good reasons to diversify your cast. One is, certainly, social justice. Others play more into the storytelling itself and are just as important. In general, there’s always a way of making your cast more diverse, too, even if the way as a such might differ, depending on your genre or general setting. Character diversity has many uses for you, so you should definitely dip into that.

The first useful point about having a diverse line-up of characters is that it opens new ways of solving the problems within the story. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every repair job looks like it needs to be done with a hammer. If you have a toolbox, there are a lot of different tools at your disposal to do the repairs in different and, quite often, more efficient ways.
If you only have a group of fighters — even worse, all using the same weapon — there’s only one way a fight can go. If your fighters are good and have some luck, they’ll defeat all the enemies with their swords and move on. You’ll have to narrate sword strike after sword strike to show how they slowly decimate the enemy troops.
If you have a group of mixed fighters, some with mêlée and some with ranged weapons, the fight will be different already. Your ranged fighters will be able to hit the enemy before the mêlée fighters have to engage it. On the other hand, your mêlée fighters have to protect the ranged fighters from direct attacks (as ranged fighters are usually weak against that). More strategy becomes necessary. Your regular fighters might have to retreat from an easy fight to defend your archers instead. Suddenly, the position of fighters on the battlefield plays much more of a role.
Now imagine you add mages and rogues to that situation. Your mage will have to be defended at all times, but can do devastating damage among the enemy troops. Your rogue might sneak away and operate behind the enemy lines, taking out powerful enemies, such as their mages, but risking capture or death in the process.
That simple, repetitive fight scene from earlier has now become a scene where a lot is happening, where several different types of characters work together to win. You have a mage and some archers in the back, a rogue behind enemy lines, and your heavily-armoured sword fighters drawing the attack in the front to give their colleagues in the back the chance to work without worrying about being hit. Which fight do you think the reader will find more riveting? The ‘sword fighter against sword fighter’ one or the ‘one diversified army against another diversified army’ one? I know which one I’d like better.

Historical accuracy is also not an excuse for not having a diverse line-up for your story. It might be unrealistic to have person of colour in a group of Vikings (but not as unrealistic as you might think), but there’s still ways of making that group more diverse. Different weapons, as shown above, can already make a difference. So can the addition of different groups which have been present in Scandinavian society. You can have a woman or two (try to avoid tokenism by putting only one member of a group in your line-up, no single character can represent a whole group). You can have members on different levels of experience. You can have someone with a disability (which wouldn’t be unusual, as it were). Your group can still be very diverse without having people from all over the world.
As soon as you dip into fantasy, there’s even less of an excuse. You make the rules for your fantasy society and population, so there’s no ‘historical accuracy’ there at all. In a story set on our world, the excuse is valid to a degree, but not in a fantasy world only based on a historical era. Fantasy middle ages are not like real-world middle ages. As soon as you give me elves, dwarves, and orcs, you’ve lost the right to complain about female warriors or visitors from warmer climes with dark skin.

Some argue that there is no reason for them to include more diverse characters because it’s not necessary for the story. It works with a group of four straight, white, able-bodied men.
Instead of asking ‘why should I have a diverse cast,’ it sometimes helps to ask ‘why should I not have a diverse cast?’ What would your story lose if you didn’t have those four straight, white, able-bodied men? What if one was a woman? What if one was a person of colour? What if one was missing an arm? Would that make your story impossible to tell? Does your main character have to be a straight man? Could they be gay? Could they be a woman? Would changing this or that aspect about the character make the story impossible to write?
In a lot of cases, the answer to all of those questions would be ‘no, it wouldn’t make the story impossible to tell.’ Even in a romance novel, it’s not necessary to have a straight couple. It’s not necessary for both of them to be white. It’s not part of the story that they’d both be able-bodied. Whenever the answer is ‘no,’ you can replace characters with different ones and create a more diverse cast.
What you need to avoid, though, is creating stereotypes and token characters. No one character can represent a group completely. Stereotypes always fall short of being deep. Research is always necessary.

Once you look into diverse characters and research what would set them apart from your regular straight white dude (as I call him), you will see new possibilities. You will see that this new character would approach a problem from a different angle, would bring in a new view of it. You will see that the person who stands in your heroes’ way would react differently when approached by a person of colour or by a woman or by someone with a missing arm. You will see that gathering information from that person who knows all about the underworld will be easier for one of the new characters you made because they might share something with that person which your straight white dude does not.
Research is necessary, though, especially if you don’t belong to a group whose member or members you want to put into your story. If in doubt, ask someone. If in doubt, leave out aspects which you can’t describe well on account of not being part of that group. There’s no need, for instance, for you as a man to describe what it’s like to give birth or to be on your period. If you don’t have a birth in your story, there’s no need to talk about it. Your female character doesn’t have to be on her period, either, unless it’s important for the story (I can’t really imagine a story in which it would be, but there probably are some).

Aim for diversity in your cast. Break away from that long line of straight white dudes saving the world and put the world’s fate into the hands of the lesbian woman or the black guy. You might be surprised at how different and new it can make your story because it opens up pathways you’ve never seen before, much less taken. Diversity isn’t just a social aspect which should be reflected in writing, it is also a better and more interesting way of telling stories.