Fiction writers are not reporters, and we have no such requirements. Our job is to create worlds and characters that draw in readers and spark emotion. And characters—especially characters written in first-person point-of-view—have biases. They believe the moon landing was faked, or that children should only be born in marriage, or that pets are an important member of the family. Characters who don’t have views of the world come across as one-dimensional and flat; people who only react to events, never acting.
Characters need bias. They need to have a point of view—not the point of view of first, second, or third, but the point of view of, “The world is a good place.” “Other women want my boyfriend.” “If I don’t have children, I will die alone with thirty cats and no one will find my body for six months.”
In House Divided, my protagonist, Erin, is a Democrat. She believes in taking care of the planet, that a woman’s career means just as much to her as a man’s does to him, and that institutions such as her children’s school should do more to recognize that. While she is not me (in some cases, she is the me I wanted to be), we share many of the same beliefs. She is a first-person protagonist.
My book is filled with Democrats and Republicans; it is a real “Inside the Beltway” novel. But I took care—I tried, anyway—to have some Democrat characters be assholes and some Republicans be really great people. Having everyone be good or bad because of their political beliefs would have been biased on my part. (Although, let’s face it, we all know that…. Oh, never mind…)
Your characters might not live in D.C. They might have nothing to do with politics. But they have opinions about things that have nothing to do with the plot in which they currently find themselves enmeshed. Make sure you know what those views are.
Make sure your characters are biased.
