“Can you write a character who is very different from you?” Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang gets this question over and over in the classes he teaches adults. He says that the job of a writer is to go outside one’s own skin, but he also believes that it is troubling—for the landscape of American literature as a whole—if the vast majority of books that talk about a particular life experience are not written by people who have actually lived that life experience.
