A question popped up in my last CRW workshop: How do you effectively write characters who are nothing like you? This one is near and dear to my heart as I tend to write characters who are racially and sexually different from me. I write a ton of Asian, Native Tribal, and white characters, though I am not any of those things in any significant way. I write women and I am a man. Still, I like to think the writing is both believable and meaningful in spite of not being connected to those cultures in a native way. How do I do it? I try to find common ground and go from there.
My partner is from the south and over the course of our relationship we’ve discovered that black culture and rural southern poor white culture is basically the same culture. The foods are the same but the slang is often different. The struggles are the same, but the focus of blame is sometimes different. The conditions are the same as often is the relationship with the law and the deep rooted familial instinct that governs both cultures. There are threads of sameness throughout the two cultures, because in many ways they come from the same place. They were just raised different.
I feel the same can be said of any gender or culture. At the root of all of it are the same wants and needs. The way we are taught to respond to such things differs, but those things can be sussed out through example. A rich kid wants the same basic things a poor kid wants–power and respect. The differences lie in the expectation of such, the level of such, the means through which it is gotten, and most importantly, the rules and language of engagement these power interactions have. Most of that requires some basic research but if you go back to the core emotional need (respect and power) you will see similar motivations. Start there.
Any cultural interaction is to me like playing a game. There are rules specific to every game as there are rules to the interactions, and everyone wants to win. As a writer it is your job to determine what winning looks like, how much it is worth to the character, as well as their ability to adhere to the rules of the game.