I have spent two years developing an incredible concept for a book series. I have developed it from a place of research-forward, inclusive, reverent perspective. But I realized, maybe I don’t have the right to write it at all.

I’ve spent two years painstakingly developing a book series concept that feels so near and dear to my heart. The setting is New Orleans, one of the cities I find so much admiration for as a whole, mostly due to its creole/Haitian culture & the resilience of its people & how that has shaped the city. The concept stems around the base of Vodou, and Vodou culture, reframing and presenting it in a way that shows it for its truth and not the fetishized idea of what it is usually portrayed as, which is magical good versus evil. This is a fictional book, but the amount of research that I’ve done to properly portray the characters is heavy, even making sure that when I do flashbacks to a time in the 70s, when some of the characters were young, I’m accurately portraying the political and cultural sphere and struggles of that time in their specific city within the development of the characters. I am so incredibly serious about this.

That’s to say when I was doing the character development about a year ago, and I was creating the web of all the people required to make the story work - in my head, most of the characters were obviously black, namely, with creole and Haitian ancestry. There are also a few Hispanic characters within that space as well. I have a couple of white characters, but they are simply supporting characters for development of the two main characters who are twins.

I have done heavy work to make sure that when developing the story, I wasn’t leaning into any black tropes, black stereotypes, and confronting any unconscious bias that I personally had because I wanted to present this in a way that represented the culture as accurately as possible as well utilizing my privilege to shine light on what I see as disrespectful to the Vodou community & culture within my storyline.

I follow quite a few people of color on social media, specifically within the writing world, and I came across one named Denise with Prose Without Thorns, who developed a concept of tiers of inclusion. When I watched the video series, it made me question whether I had the right to even write a book from the perspective of black main characters. Not because she had actually said that you can or cannot do so, but because I never took a second to realize that perhaps a white person writing a book from a black perspective and then potentially profiting off of that would be insensitive on top of me writing about a group I am not a part of. In my head prior to this, I saw it as myself doing the work to properly tell a story with a culture that I respect and making sure that I represent them appropriately, but then I realized maybe that’s not how it would be perceived.

I really want to make sure I’m not overstepping a boundary, no matter how much I’ve researched or are coming at it from a place of reverence and respect. How I feel here is not part of the equation in my eyes. If it is a general consensus that it’s inappropriate, I will scrap the whole book, to my heartbreak. I would love to understand this more - I am a “why” kid at heart & want to understand it either direction.