Author Chat: Writing an Identity Not Your Own With Alex Temblador

Tara: Before we get into today’s episode, I have an exciting announcement. Today I’m chatting with Alex Temblador, the author of Writing an Identity Not Your Own, and to celebrate the release of Alex’s book, her publisher, St. Martin’s, has kindly supplied a copy of the book for me to give away to one special podcast listener.

So all you have to do is go to TaraWhitaker.com/Identity to enter. Now, without further ado, here’s my interview with Alex.

Welcome to The Modern Editor Podcast, where we talk about all things editing and what it’s like to run an editorial business in today’s world. I’m your host, Tara Whitaker. Let’s get to it.

All right, everyone. Hi there. Welcome to today’s episode. If you are a regular listener of the podcast, you are in for a treat because we have our very first guest on the show today. And I cannot think of a better person to have than Alex Temblador, the author of the upcoming book, or by the time this comes out, the released book, Writing an Identity Not Your Own.

So Alex Temblador is the Mixed Latine award-winning author of two novels, Secrets of the Casa Rosada and Half Outlaw. Writing an Identity Not Your Own is her first nonfiction book. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Central Oklahoma and is a contributor to Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America, and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology.

Alex has taught creative writing classes and given presentations with Macmillan, the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, Writing Workshops, the Writer’s League of Texas, and more, as well as spoken about diversity and representation in the literary world with the Texas Library Association, Abydos Learning Conference, and at many other festivals, conferences, and universities.

She is an award-winning travel, arts, and culture journalist who specializes in diversity, equity, and inclusion, publishing in the likes of Condé Nast Traveler, Outside, and Travel + Leisure, and speaking about such topics at SXSW, the Society of American Travel Writers, and the World Travel Market.

Alex lives in Dallas, Texas, where she runs a literary panel series called LitTalk and is the executive director of Write Here DFW. Alex, we are thrilled to have you today. 

Alex: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so honored to be the first guest.

Tara: Yay! And given your bio, you don’t have much going on these days. You just, you know. 

Alex: No, looking for things to do. 

Tara: I do wonder, how do you fit all that in? Oh my goodness. 

Alex: I don’t know. I can’t focus just on one thing. I need multiple things going on at the same time for me. It’s exciting and, uh, stressful and fun, so. 

Tara: Well, and now you’ve got your third book that has just released, so let’s talk about it.

Alex: Yes, let’s get into it. 

Tara: So, my first question for you is, I guess it’s kind of a dual question, but, what has your writing journey been like? Like, how have you gotten from wherever you started, if you were writing at a young age, or you did it later in life, to now releasing your third book, but first nonfiction book?

Alex: Absolutely. So I started putting pen to paper when I was probably in sixth grade, started writing fantasy books, because I just love that. But I didn’t finish my first novel until I was in college. It was a vampire series. Of course it was. Because at the time it was, that was in. Yeah. I think I put it on Amazon for a little bit. It has since come down. You can’t find it, which is probably great.

I actually was a history major in college and I took a class my second year—I was only in three years in undergrad—my second year, I took a short story writing class. After the first class, I went home, decided I was going to get an MFA.

I was going to be a writer. It was a done deal. And I went, got my MFA in creative writing at the University of Central Oklahoma. Ironically, I did not get accepted into the MFA program. I got accepted into the MA with a creative writing, you know, uh, focus program at first, but then I switched over to the MFA and my thesis was actually my first book.

So yeah, so that took a little bit to get published, but my thesis was my first book at a small press in Houston called Arte Público. It’s the largest Hispanic publisher in the US. And from there, I sold my second one in 2020. It came out in 2022, Half Outlaw, at Blackstone.

And then Writing an Identity Not Your Own, ugh, how that came up. Well, this book called American Dirt came out in 2020 and, um, caused some discussion before the pandemic hit. And then after the pandemic hit, we had a lot of things to focus on, but somebody asked me to teach a class on the subject because they had a lot of feedback from people wanting to know more about the topic, but they didn’t have anyone to teach it.

And I had taught some classes on diversity, like, for people of color who want to query agents, like what that process might be like and what they can expect in publishing, and the head of writing workshops kind of knew my background in diversity, equity, and representation. And I agreed to do it, but was very nervous.

I think I had over a hundred people in that class. Which was a lot. Like, if you know Zoom classes, that’s like, whoa, that’s a ton. Yeah. I mean, like that meant more people probably signed up and we had a hundred, like over a hundred in the class. It was wild. So I ended up teaching that class and after that first one, my name kind of just started popping up among places, and people shared with other people about me teaching the class.

So I started teaching with other places and, um, two years later, I got this idea that maybe I should write a book about it. And I approached my agent and she thought it was a good idea. So yeah, that’s kind of the journey. Wow. Sounds so short, but it was a long, it feels like a long time. 

Tara: For sure. And not to mention a lot of work and energy and time and navigating lots of different things going on in the world at that time and continue to happen in the world. That’s, that’s a lot. 

Alex: Absolutely. I mean, I feel like this book, Writing an Identity Not Your Own, took a lot from me. I mean, I thought writing novels took a lot out of me, but this one was even more so. I was very nervous. Even though I approached my agent with it, which I knew was a wild step, but I was very nervous to work on this book to approach it.

I knew about the conversations happening on every single side of this topic, but I also knew that like, no one was doing anything and nothing was actually being discussed at conferences. It was a panel for an hour, if that, and a lot of people on panels would be scared to get into it or didn’t really want to, you know, just to analyze it as deeply as it could be analyzed.

And so I had a friend tell me she thought I wanted to understand every single aspect about it, and that’s why I wrote it, and I think she was probably right. 

Tara: So for everyone listening, I was very fortunate to be able to read a copy of the book before it came out. I feel so special. Like I said before, the work, it is so thorough, and you can tell you put so much thought and effort into it from every single aspect you can imagine.

So when you were saying about how nobody was talking about it, and it would be like a panel, I think we, maybe most of us, could probably agree that a lot of stuff that has happened in the past few years is pretty performative and this is not. This is actually discussing it head-on and not tiptoeing around it. It’s actually discussing it, which is so frickin needed right now. 

Alex: Thank you for saying that. I just got chills. Because I hate tiptoeing. Like, I’m a very blunt, direct person. I’m very mindful about how to, you know, talk to people about very difficult topics. I’ve been doing that for quite a while in my journalist career.

But at the same time, like, this is just a topic we need to get real about it. Let’s go deep. Let’s say all the things. And it’s funny, um, I don’t know. I don’t mean to put you on the spot here, but you asked me, are there things that I don’t want to discuss? And I get that question from everybody who’s been interested in interviewing me or whenever I’m speaking in a class or at a presentation.

And I’m always like, no, let’s go. Like, please, just ask me. I’m excited to get into this. And if I don’t know something, then I’m going to go and look more into it so that maybe I help.

Tara: No, I was so pumped when you said that. I was like, good, let’s just talk about it. Like you said, let’s, we’re done tiptoeing. We’re just not, we’re just not going to do that anymore. Which actually leads into a really good question that one of my group members had was. This is from Massiel. And she said, how can authors feel confident when writing other voices, and how do we quell the fear of not getting it right? Which kind of related to that tiptoeing thing or not knowing what to do as an author, how do they quell those fears? 

Alex: Okay, so the fear is probably not going to go away completely. I just like, want to share that with people. I’m very sorry. And I don’t think this is just a fear among writers. It’s going to be editors too, and publishers as well.

And that is because you have bias. You will always have bias. That bias will never go. You can recognize the bias. You can work through it. You can understand it. But funnily enough, you continue to live in this world and consume media and interact with other people. And you grow older and more biased. And it’s going to become ingrained in you.

So it’s a lifelong project, journey of yours to be able to break down that bias and make sure it doesn’t get into your work. And I say that not to like, discourage people, but to help them understand that you are human. I think there’s this idea that writers are just so intelligent and we just, we just understand things and we got it.

And yes, we do wild things with our mind, like create whole new worlds, but we’re just still human. And this stuff is going to continue to come up. So if you want to feel confident about this, I would say do three things. 

One, you need to read and/or consume media by the people who represent the identity you wish to write about. Support them, be their allies. That means buying their work, promoting them on social media, read from their perspective. That’s going to help you out a lot.

Two, do as much research as you can. And when you’re creating a character, you’re creating a setting or a world in which other identities exist, we need to look at everything that we possibly can and educate ourselves on it.

So that means what does somebody from that identity believe based on their culture? Um, what is something that they experienced in terms of social settings? Do you need to understand the legal experiences that somebody that identity might have or familial cultural nuances that only people within that community would be able to tell you?

And you can do a lot of that from just like, basic research and watching documentaries, reading nonfiction stuff, listening to podcasts, et cetera. Yeah.

And then the third thing, the most important thing that I think will give you the most confidence, and probably the one thing that I think a lot of people will struggle with because there’s this idea that writers are very introverted, and maybe some of us are, is connecting with people from that identity within an actual authentic relationship.

So this isn’t your coworker, this isn’t somebody you just see at your religious institution, or like a parent of somebody at your kid’s school. That’s not how it works. Like, you have to actually make a real connection with them. And when you do that, they, if you’re doing it authentically, will start opening up to you in ways that they might not do to other outsiders.

So you will start to understand what’s at stake if you get something wrong. If you put a misrepresentation out there, you’ll also be more like, privy to things that you wouldn’t be able to find in research. So I think those three things can provide a lot of confidence, but it’s just, I mean, like anything, it’s practice, practice, practice, right?

Tara: Exactly. And, um, it actually brought up a question that I had too, because something that I hear or see I guess online in the whole publishing/writing/editing industry, mostly from authors, is it’s too hard for me to do all of that work, there’s too much work to do with it, like, why can’t I just write about myself and make them a different race, religion, ethnicity, etc.

Because I love your bluntness, and I want to hear this. What do you say to writers out there who just dismiss any advice and just say, that’s just too hard. Or I don’t know anybody of the identity that I want to write about. So what do I do?

Alex: This isn’t the path for you.

Tara: There it is.

Alex: I mean, honestly, I would very much highly suggest you don’t take this path, um, but I’ll go further into it. You can’t just change and like, you can’t just write yourself into something and change one identity because that’s not how people of that identity actually live. They don’t live like you, they don’t experience the world like you, whether that’s one or two different identity changes or three.

They have absolutely different experiences. And not only are your readers going to recognize it, literary agents are going to recognize it. Publishers I hope will recognize it. Now, I know things have been published where they don’t always recognize it, but do you want to get to a point in a publishing career or with a piece of work where you’re getting awful reviews, your agent doesn’t want to sell your work, your publisher wants to give back the contract. Like, all these things could potentially happen. I don’t think you’d want to put yourself in that situation just to protect yourself. And anyways, if you were writing somebody who had a similar identity as you, you would put in the research.

Like, this is part of the job is us going out and researching worlds or people or jobs or whatever it may be that we’re presenting in our work. There’s so much research. And I think many writers would say that it’s one of the most important things that we can do, and to not do it would just be lazy and a disservice to your readers, to be honest, and to yourself.

Tara: I love it. And honestly, I think the subtext of that phrase or saying or whatever of I don’t, I don’t know anybody or I don’t want to do the work, is I don’t want to confront my biases, and I don’t want to feel uncomfortable, and I don’t want to acknowledge that maybe I have not so great, uh, thoughts, ideas, what have you stereotypes of people, and I don’t want to confront that. So, it’s too hard.

Alex: Yes, you just said it. Yeah, it’s hard to go and make, friends as adults, we know this. Like, that is not easy, right? Like, we all have that struggle. Yeah. But it’s easier for you to sit in your house and not do anything and not actually meet somebody who was within that identity. If you can’t put yourself in uncomfortable situations, I don’t think you grow as a person.

And I definitely don’t think you grow as a writer. I mean, just even me personally, as a writer, I’m changing kind of fiction-wise how I’ve written in the past. I’m not approaching it the same way. And it’s so uncomfortable. I hate it. It’s awful.

The writing process is so slow, but I know that I have the capability to do these things, just as I know that people have the capability to go out there and connect with somebody who is also human. I mean, we forget that. And again, you have bias. So if you can accept that, hopefully that will. you know, open the door a little bit for you to get out of your own way.

Tara: Yeah. And approaching that friendship from an authentic perspective, not like, oooh, I’m going to infiltrate this person’s family so I can do research for my book.

Alex: Yes. Yeah. Don’t do that. People will recognize it too, and shut you down real quick. Yeah. And then it becomes weird and awkward and uncool.

Tara: Right. And it’s already weird and awkward making friends as an adult. So let’s not make it worse. 

Alex: Yeah, don’t put yourself through that. 

Tara: Please don’t. Or do and learn from it, I guess. 

Alex: Yeah, that too. There we go. 

Tara: Oh my gosh. So, with all of the work that you did, you know, with the presentations and then writing the book, has anything stood out to you as a big surprise or a wow moment or something that you just didn’t expect to happen, happened?

Alex: Uh, people liking it?

I don’t know. I was, I mean, I was literally, and I know people hate that word literally, but I mean, it’s for emphasis here. I was literally crying for like, months after I finished this book, and it was just in fear of going like, did I get it wrong? Did I leave something out? Something that I should have put in?

And eventually I worked through it and realized like, there’s chances for second editions. I mean, if I make something wrong, if I did something wrong, wrote something incorrectly, I’m just going to do what I tell people to do in the book is to accept it, admit it, make changes, and do better. And also kind of having a little pride for myself.

I know people shouldn’t admit that, but I I’m fine with it. We should be proud of ourselves more. I did it. I wrote it. And a lot of people do not want to touch this with a ten-foot pole, and the feedback I’ve gotten has been phenomenal. Like, I’m very surprised. It makes me very happy. I’m excited to see where this can go.

But otherwise, I wasn’t expecting to be able to read the audiobook. I was glad for that. That was very cool and exciting. I’ve also, I’m one of those writers who loves to read their reviews. So I do read their reviews. Everyone thinks I’m wild for that, but I do, and it’s really funny to read reviews.

One person said that it could induce a literary identity crisis, which I thought was wonderfully said. I’ve had a few people assume that I’m a man because of my name. And so they use he/him/his pronouns in the review, and that’s so funny to me. 

Tara: Especially given the topic! Good grief. 

Alex: Yeah, yep. And the irony just, I love those ironic moments. It’s fun for me. 

Tara: I mean, those reviews would make me giggle too. I mean, I commend you for being able to read your own reviews. I feel like, I’m not a writer, but if I was, I would probably do it just to like, make myself feel bad. I would not. Oh, I could think of so many other things that I could do. It just, it makes me nervous right now. And I don’t even have a book to review about.

Alex: I’m like, well, what is coming up. If something does come up that I did make a mistake, I want to be on it right away. Like, let’s get into it now. So that’s part of it. But I’ve been doing this with all my other books. So it’s not like, new. 

Tara: That’s true. You’re a little maybe desensitized to it a little bit. Oh, I still give you huge props for that. Oh my goodness. Thank you. Speaking of going back or doing different editions or getting things right, because we are The Modern Editor Podcast and we’re talking to editors, I would love to hear about the editing process for this book.

And then I also want to talk about the editing checklist you included in the book, which is just amazing. 

Alex: So, the editing process that I did for this book? 

Tara: Yes, yes, going through with your editor and you self-editing and that whole process.

Alex: Yeah. So, um, people ask me like, how long it took me to write this book, which is a very odd answer that I have, or I have a very odd answer.

Um, really it took six months, but I’ve been researching it for years before that, you know, because I’ve been teaching for so long. And then I had also been doing research on my own with my own books beyond. When I was teaching it and then I include a lot of first-person experiences, so stuff that I experienced just my whole writing career and and even when I was, you know, giving presentations on short stories and in novels in grad school, I pulled from some of that. But anyway, so I wrote it for six months and then I think I had like a month off. I got my edits back and I had one month to do all the edits.

And this is the moment where I’m crying, like, because I’m so nervous with it. Most of the edits I would receive back weren’t like, big structural issues. It would be like, questioning something that I had put in there. Like, did you mean to say it this way? Or could we say it a little bit clearer? I have never had this many edits on a book before. Like, I was editing it up until the day before the book was sent to the printers. 

Tara: Wow.

Alex: Yeah, my editor was like, I need this answered in two hours. Like, give this back to me. And I’m just like, quick, quick, quick. Even actually, no, that’s not true because when I was recording the audiobook, I found a few little grammar mistakes.

I was sending them all to her, like, we got to fix this in the next print or whatever. So I’m very, like, if you find something, I may have caught it in the audio recording. But it was interesting. One of the last major edits that I had was probably about two weeks before the book went to print. And I adjusted the, there’s chapter 11, which has like, all the stereotypes and tropes broken down for every single identity that I have in the book: race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, nationality, religion, body type, substance use disorder, houselessness.

And I readjusted the race section, like added a whole new section, added like all these new tropes and stereotypes because of stuff happening in the world that I was reflecting on and going, I have to put this in the book. I have to put this in the book. So, um, I was making kind of significant changes up until the end. That’s just the kind of, you know, writer that I am. And as for the editing checklist, I’m so glad to hear that you enjoyed it. 

Tara: Yes. Oh my, like you said, well, with chapter 11, with going through the stereotypes and the tropes, when I say thorough, like that doesn’t even encompass what it is.

Like, it is so good. I can see how writers would refer back to the book, obviously the whole entire book repeatedly, but that chapter is chef’s kiss. 

Alex: Thank you. Yeah. Well, because my belief is that actually be part of this whole like, writing process is going to be done in the editing phase, and this is, we’re talking to editors here, where things are gonna be caught is in the editing phase. I hope writers catch themselves when they’re writing, but I also know what it’s like for me to get like, in the groove. I’m not stopping. I’m just, it’s just flowing and bias comes out like that when you’re in the mood.

But you know, you’re working, you don’t want to stop and go back and edit. So it’s going to be done in the editing phase. So I knew that I needed to have such a thorough editing checklist. And that checklist kind of came about because when I was editing my second book, Half Outlaw, I’d been teaching this class funnily enough.

And I thought I knew a ton about it. And I did, I knew a lot about that, those aspects, and I had characters in Half Outlaw who are of different identities. Some with disabilities, some who are Indigenous, Black, had substance use disorder, uh, were adopted, et cetera. And a lot of those identities I do not have, and I don’t have close connections to within my family, et cetera.

I was kind of doing everything that I did in that editing checklist, kind of on the fly. And I was going through and going, okay, I’m just going to focus on this one character. And now I’m going to focus on this next character. Now I’m going to go through dialogue and just focus on everyone’s dialogue.

And I break that editing checklist, it’s very long, but I break it down I hope in a way that gets people to see when we’re writing or editing other identities, sometimes it’s good to just focus on one single subject rather than reading through the book ten times in a row to catch all these things.

Because it can be a lot to manage the fifteen different things that you need to edit for. So if you just focus on, okay, now I’m just gonna focus on stereotypes within this specific genre that I’m writing. Let’s read through it and just focus on stereotypes. Did I put something in there unintentionally? Hopefully that can help people out. 

Tara: Oh, for sure. And you actually brought up a question that I had, because obviously the title is Writing an Identity Not Your Own, aimed at writers. Who else would benefit from reading this book? 

Alex: Yeah. So I tell writers in the book, I mean that absolutely it is on you to get all of this right, but we’re not the only one in our industry. We rely on editors so much, and editors are also biased. They also might not be educated in certain topics or they might feel more comfortable with editing grammar versus other things, whatever it may be. But I do think editors want to, like, editors have pride in the work that they, like, the services that they provide writers, and I think this can be a major guide for them as well.

There’s a whole very long section for them that I think is useful for them too, that they can go through and go, like, oh, wow. I was reading this book. Something there doesn’t feel right. Let me go to the, like the editing section, or let me go to the discrimination section and just kind of like, catch myself up, maybe look further into something in that section that is relevant to the book that I’m editing.

Of course, I hope this brings about more sensitivity readers. That would be fantastic for our industry. And if you read the very, the introduction and many parts of the book, I really hope that publishing as a whole takes this book and runs with it as well. And I mean that, not just the editors who work in publishing, I also mean the PR and social media and the marketing teams.

Because as many writers and authors know, things have to go through, like your book has to go through many steps, it has to go through many people to even be bought, to even be sold, to be published, and I want as many people to have this awareness about writing and editing other identities so that they can catch each other.

It’s not my intention that people read this book and are like, trying to like, catch people in a mistake. Like, that’s not what I want, but I want them to go, hey, we’re all on the same side here. We want to put out good books. We don’t want to put out something that is going to be a trash fire that like, it just spreads and we can’t, it gives us a bad reputation and it’s something that we did not intend to do.

I want them to be like, hey, you know, something there just doesn’t feel right, like maybe we need to re-examine this, or maybe we need to bring a sensitivity reader or another editor who has that same identity in to discuss this. So I’m hoping it’s a multilevel, it works on multiple levels within our industry, yeah.

Tara: Yeah, well I think literally everyone in the world should read it regardless of industry, but absolutely the publishing industry, even cover artists. Stereotypes bleed into that and how characters are portrayed or settings or everything. And when you’re talking about all the people that see a book before it gets published, that’s in traditional publishing.

If you’re self-publishing, the number of people goes down. So sometimes it’s the author, the editor, maybe a cover designer if they’ve hired that out, and that can be it. So authors and editors for sure must read this. This is like, on my must-read list. I actually recommended it to someone today on a call. I was like, you’re looking into developmental editing? Yes, you need to read this book. It’s not out yet, but…

Alex: Thank you. Yes. And with self-publishing, there are little notes in the book, like, especially in the editing checklist. I’m like, yep, okay, if you’re self-publishing and you don’t have all these other people, let’s do another round of beta readers and sensitivity readers.

And here’s some other ways you might be able to edit and catch these things, because I mean, just the way self-publishing is set up, they’re going to have to do a little bit extra work and that kind of comes with self-publishing, they know that.

Tara: You know. Sure, right. It’s, yeah, they know. They know. Well, and it’s kind of funny because when I was thinking about this with cover designers, there was actually another question that came up in the community. And we talked about this. I know you talk about it in the book in the identities and genre section, but, Nadia was asking how she should guide a sci-fi writer who might be writing about characters from different planets. Can these writers still fall prey to harmful portrayals and misrepresentations? What are some ways that sci-fi writers should approach describing other races, disabilities, communities, etc.?

And Rebecca followed up with, I want to learn about fantasy too. So genres like that where you’re making up things, how do they approach that from a perspective of not stereotyping or having these biases come out unintentionally or intentionally. 

Alex: Absolutely, yeah, fantasy and sci-fi writers, I would not say that they’re necessarily like the ones that are pushing back against this as much, because I don’t think they are. I think there’s one other genre that does it a little bit more, but sci-fi and fantasy writers tend to like, have this idea, or they could have this idea that I, well, I’m just making this up.

I’m going to write something that’s never been written or I’m going to invent it. It’s not our world. And the reality is your brain cannot create anything that you do not have a basis in reality. You can’t write a history of a planet without drawing upon your knowledge of history of our own planet.

Like, it just doesn’t work. I wish we could. It’s just not how our brains work. So with that said, biases are going to come into your work. So just expect it as well. We know that there are so many stereotypes and tropes that come up with different identities, historically marginalized identities. I have whole lists for you in the book that you can utilize now.

This was something I was thinking about the other day after I went to a conference down in Austin with Writers’ League of Texas, and I moderated a fantasy and a sci-fi panel, and just thinking about things afterwards. And one thing that I think editors should discuss with their writers is with fantasy and sci-fi writers, you’re making this whole world up, right? You have decided, maybe you decide, I’m just going to make everybody the exact same race, and I’m not here to tell you that that is wrong. It might actually work, but your readers are going to also have the questions of, well, why do you only have one race?

Logically, would the planet or the world or the dimension have one race? Are you committing like this monocultural homogenizing a race trope? If you decide I’m not going to have anybody with disabilities, they’re gonna go, why don’t you? Are you erasing people with disabilities? Like, you’re always gonna have this pushback, a little bit of people critiquing and wondering, well, if you don’t have that, you need to explain it.

Yes, readers can suspend their disbelief, but what you don’t have in there could also showcase some bias as well, as much as what you actually do have in the text. 

Tara: That’s such a good point. I just had like, the mic-drop moment where when we talked about fear and how to get over the fear of doing it wrong. You can either put in the work and get something wrong, or you cannot put in the work and get something wrong. Which would you choose? I would rather put in the work. 

Alex: Absolutely, because, I mean, likely you’re gonna do maybe a little less wrong, I hope, like, ideally. But at least you’ll learn something if you put in the work. Like, you’re not gonna not learn something. Yeah. 

Tara: Yeah. And readers know. Readers know. We know when we read a book what’s going on. We can decide, or not decide, but figure out maybe what the author was intending without saying it or with saying it. We’re, we’re not, don’t pander, we’re smart.

Alex: And I read, I’ve been reading so much fantasy and sci-fi in the last few years. Like, I kind of paused on reading it for a while. I was just reading a lot of literary fiction. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff that has just been published, stuff published in the last few years. And like, I catch it like so often, like sometimes it is just one line or sometimes it’s a book that has won a notable award and I’ll be reading it like, what they’re doing to people with disabilities in this book is very awful. What is happening here? And it won an award, and people love it, and it’s a well-written book. But just because something’s well written doesn’t mean that something in there was not approached that well. 

Tara: Exactly. Yep. Okay, so we talked about sci-fi and fantasy, but then you mentioned Tthere’s another genre that does it more. Now you got my interest piqued.

Alex: Yeah, I think historical fiction writers push back on this. Their arguments are generally, I am, I mean, it’s one line, it’s historically accurate. And I go, show me the receipts, show me the receipts. Or also, who cares if it’s historically accurate? And I’ll explain this is from the conquerors. That is usually people of privileged status. We don’t have first-person accounts from people of different marginalized identities because either they were destroyed or never written down from oral history or whatever.

It’s all been written from privileged people’s perspectives, so I already have a sense of distrust or at least a more critical eye when I’m reading history and going like, okay, you said this happened and maybe it did, but now I have to think about how it happened from somebody else’s perspective.

I mean, this is not the best example, but it’s very easy. The perspective of World War II, even just from the US’s perspective and England’s perspective, is going to be totally different. And how they write it in their history books are going to be different from ours. So, critiquing historical accuracy, one.

But two, like, just because every fictional work that you’ve read from the 1800s had people saying certain words does not mean that the whole public used those slander, like used those slurs. It does not mean that it was used as often as you think it might’ve been. It could have, it could have also not been.

And also you’ve got to ask yourself, do I want to put my readers through that? Do I want to contribute to this harmful practice? And also remember it’s fiction. And if you don’t include it, I don’t think anyone’s going to knock on your door and ask you, where was that harmful slur? 

Tara: But let’s also call it what it is. They want to use the word. Or the words. Or the stereotype. Or, like, trope.

Alex: And you can use stereotypes and tropes. They can be used thoughtfully and with intention. But they’re harmful, they’re harmful. And you’re gonna have to kill your darlings as a writer, period, in many instances. And unfortunately, like, I feel like sometimes people don’t want to do that in terms of writing other identities because they don’t want to admit again that they have bias or that they were wrong, and they feel uncomfortable, and I understand that, but it just kind of needs to be done.

Tara: Yep. It’s funny, well, not funny, but with bias, you know, being on my own journey with uncovering and learning about my own, tt’s shocking how much of it stems from childhood, and I don’t think I realized that until I really started working on it. Even just recognizing things or learning about stereotypes or how characters are portrayed, the TV I watched, we can even, Disney movies from the ’80s and ’90s, that’s a whole other podcast, probably a podcast, not even an episode, crime, who’s the bad guys, who’s the good guys, so much of it has come from my childhood, and it has made me so aware of what I need to be aware of and fight against, but also with my own kids, Making sure that they are not experiencing things that I did in not a good way.

It’s, yeah, it’s a journey, though. It’s not something that I’m going to, or anybody is going to be like, okay, done, done, I’m done confronting my biases. We’re done. Wouldn’t that be great on so many different levels of everything in life? But that’s not how it works. It’s a whole journey and it’s constant. And yeah, there’s a lot of work to it, but, you need to put in the work. 

Alex: Yeah. There’s an exercise in the book at the beginning, and it’s actually repeated at the end, but it makes you look at who you are surrounded by, like the closest people to you, and has you just do this little exercise to see like, who you surround yourself with. I think it usually mirrors who you were surrounded by when you were a child, who like, your family was around. And if you were only surrounded by people who are from the same class or education level or race or disabilities or sexual orientation, it’s limiting your scope of experiences.

Those people are fantastic and wonderful in your life. Because you could potentially have this group of people who are exactly like you, that would be the in group. And because of that, your mind works to go, well, that’s the out group. Like, those other people who are not me are the out group.

And, funnily enough, and I know this being a mix, half Mexican, half white. I have a white side, I have a Mexican side, in terms of family. Even when I am in the close vicinity of somebody on my white side, and they’re like, we love Alex, she’s great, we want the best for her, because of bias, and most everybody else around them are white, if we’re talking about issues related to Mexican Americans, they’ll go, well, Alex isn’t like that. I don’t think of Alex like that, but those ones over there, I don’t like that.

And so even just having one person who is of a different identity within your closed circle doesn’t always necessarily mean that you’re free from bias. In fact, it doesn’t. My brother’s queer. I have written a book that we’re trying to sell, and I made a mistake in the book where I showcase something that I did not mean to showcase for a queer character. It was such a subtle, like, literally like five words in a line.

And I had a beta reader point it out, and it took me quite a bit to look at it. And even beyond just my brother being queer, I’ve also, my first job as a journalist was writing for queer-focused sites.

Like, I wrote about same-sex marriage becoming legal in the US. Like, I would, that was some of my first pieces and I was writing about the transgender movement here and everything. So I’ve done a lot of research, but even then, like, I still make mistakes. So as writers and editors, I hope we’re aware that, like, just because we also have one connection or two or three doesn’t mean that things can’t come up in your work. It, they can.

Tara: And you do that throughout the book, multiple times, you share when you have addressed things in your own writing, which I was, I mean, I was blown away, like, that’s vulnerable, right? To admit when you screw up, when anybody, not screw up, or just do something that you didn’t intentionally do, but you confront it in the book multiple times, and you’re just like, yeah, I did this too. I just put all of them in there.

Alex: I mean, like, I mess up all the time, and I thought as the author of this book, like, how am I going to ask you to admit to mistakes or to accept something upon reflection that you’ve written or didn’t catch while editing if I don’t share with that my experiences too? And honestly, like, my biggest thing that I hope people take away, like if they think about one thing is you have biases, accept them, that’ll just like, treat you well in every aspect of your life.

If you can start in that manner, but I had to show, I thought it was important for me to show people that I have biases and they come up with my work. I mean, I was editing something the other day and I was like, that’s not what I want to say, that’s not it. Nope, that’s not a good thing. Yeah. 

Tara: I mean, you’re human. I’m a human. Yeah. So we’re all here to learn. Yeah. Exactly. And you mentioned the exercises. I think it’s, excuse me, after every chapter or even after every section, you have actionable exercises for writers to work through.

And like I said, I’m not a writer, but I need to know it for editing. I went through all the exercises kind of, I mean, I made them up a little bit because I didn’t have anything to write on or a book to reflect on, but they’re so good and so in depth and make you really think. This isn’t superficial performative BS. This is looking deep and confronting a lot of stuff that I think we all need to do, period.

Alex: Thank you. Yeah, some of the, most of the chapters have an exercise at the end, but some of them actually do have chapters between sections, because some of the chapters are very long. So I needed to break them up a bit.

But yeah, I was trying to be mindful. You know, writing exercises, sometimes I feel a little corny, like, is this corny? Is this like, do I feel like, am I, I hope I’m not treating them like children here. But maybe like, us going back to the basics is a good thing for us because as writers, I can tell you a lot of writers, we intuitively write, or we weren’t necessarily taught to like, think about this character and how do you build them out completely?

And if we’re talking about different identities, I can tell you MFA programs do not like, break that down for you. Usually you go in and they’re like, all right, submit something. We have a workshop. We’re not going to break it down, like, we don’t break down how that character was built or if they’re intersectional, or did you get that thing correctly about their identity or whatever it may be. This doesn’t happen in a lot of writing programs or classes.

And so I kind of wanted to push people back a little bit and go like, let’s start from the beginning. Like, let’s rethink how we’ve approached our writing. And I hope some of these exercises and like, what comes out of it helps whoever’s reading it go like, okay, I’m really strong in this aspect, but I’m not strong in this aspect of approaching, let’s say, dialect.

If I’m not strong in approaching dialect in one way, maybe that means I need to keep practicing. Or if I have gotten everything else that I can do done for this book, maybe I need to take a different path. You don’t have to be like a ram just ramming your head into a wall. Like, you can go around things or look for different options or opportunities in your work instead of just like, doing the thing that you get in your head that you think you need to do. Sometimes it’s good to find alternatives. Yeah. Especially in this process. 

Tara: Not be so stubborn. 

Alex: Yes. Yeah. Yes, and you might just not be ready to do whatever the subject is at the time, like, it might take five years, and that’s okay. 

Tara: Yeah, but we want it now. Quick, fast, easy, cheap, now. 

Alex: Yep, we have been taught that, and that is another one of our biases.

Tara: Yep. I mean, I fall into that often. I want things now, I am so impatient. Why isn’t this happening right now? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yep. Add that to the list. Yes, please. Oh my gosh. Okay, well, I feel like we could talk for another couple hours, but for the sake of, you know, not taking up your entire day, where can we learn more about you, your books, what you’re doing, where you’re speaking, where everything is happening, where do we go to learn? 

Alex: Yeah. So my main website is alextemblador.com. So it’s just my first and last name dot com. I also have a writinganidentitynotyourown.com website. So I am trying to be better at this, but I will probably put up blogs here and there just on different topics that come up that I was not able to put in the book or like I get questions at conferences etc, and that’ll have events and contact information, both sites will, and I even will have like, interviews and video interviews or podcasts on there so that if you don’t catch something, please go listen to them, check them out.

I am open and available for speaking engagements, so please ask. But besides that, I think Instagram, Twitter, and Threads are great places to connect with me on @Alex_Temblador. I am trying to be active on Instagram and share more Reels and posts that will discuss the topic with the book out. I plan to do like, little tips here and there.

So hold me to it, please, because I do a lot of other things, and sometimes my attention gets pulled in so many places, but I do want to do that. 

Tara: Okay, I will. Make a note, and I will include all of that info in the show notes too. So you don’t have to write it down or anything. We’ll have it on the website.

Thank you so much for being here, Alex. You have like, the bar is high for other podcast guests now—way up there. So thank you so much for being here and chatting with me. It’s been amazing. 

Alex: Thank you. I loved all your questions. They’re fantastic. Hello to the community. I hope this book helps you all as well, and I look forward to your feedback. 

Tara: And if you haven’t grabbed a copy, grab a copy of Writing an Identity Not Your Own wherever books are sold. So, with that, thank you for joining us and we’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode. If you enjoy The Modern Editor Podcast, I would be so grateful if you left us a review over on iTunes. And as always, you can head to TaraWhitaker.com to connect with me and stay in touch. We’ll chat again soon.