Wednesday links: Including diversity

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few. Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. How to include realistic diversity for your story’s setting without coming off as trying too hard, from Writing With Color: Have you ever heard the phrase “token ______ friend,” filling in the blank with any number of racial descriptions? It’s definitely something you don’t want people saying about one of your characters. So how do you avoid it? Excerpt: ” Talking about Arizona specifically, you should look up which groups of people besides white folks you’re most likely to encounter IN Arizona (recent census information, for example) and have a couple of each, rather than one person each from three or four different groups.”