Multicultural Fiction - Culture Must Be A Character

 Culture is a part of your personal life. You love your culture and you want to share it with the world. What better venue than to write a novel centered on that culture? It is a perfect idea.

And yet...

So many authors miss the mark. 

Oh, the idea is there, but in the end, the execution of the story fails epically, and the reason is simple. The author forgot the culture. They forgot to make the culture a character in the story. 

Consider this information from Texas A & M

• Culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
• Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
• Culture is communication, communication is culture.
• Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.
• A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
• Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
• Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
• Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted from generation to generation.
• Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.

Your characters and all of their experiences have to be immersed in the culture. Actions, behaviors, communication and language should be there for us to be a part of. Authors should be immersed in the culture. Don't just tell us, show us.

Personally, as a literature major, one of my favorites who does this so well is Sandra Cisneros. 

Just as a side note... #MSWL I am looking for Multicultural romance and women's fiction.