I'm not sure if you are trying to be funny or not. I personally think people should write what they want but always ask yourself, is this a story that you should be telling? Given the description of your next historical fiction novel, yes this is absolutely a story that you should be telling, you are pulling from your own experiences. Now if you were writing this story directly from the perspective of the African-American actor, that I would question.
You should NOT get lost in it. All writing is an act of imaginative empathy, and if writers write books based only on their "lived experience" (god how I hate that term), we wouldn't have Anna Karenina or Portrait of a Lady or Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni (not a golem! not a jinii!).
This sounds great! Unless you're writing a memoir, you aren't expected to have identical lived experiences to your main character. Sensitivity readers are important and respect for the cultures/ethnicities/religions is too. Write the story you want to write. Rose sounds like a wonderful heroine.
I'm not sure if you are trying to be funny or not. I personally think people should write what they want but always ask yourself, is this a story that you should be telling? Given the description of your next historical fiction novel, yes this is absolutely a story that you should be telling, you are pulling from your own experiences. Now if you were writing this story directly from the perspective of the African-American actor, that I would question.
You should NOT get lost in it. All writing is an act of imaginative empathy, and if writers write books based only on their "lived experience" (god how I hate that term), we wouldn't have Anna Karenina or Portrait of a Lady or Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni (not a golem! not a jinii!).
Write what you want, and anybody who tells you want you can't write is your enemy.
That said, it would probably be a good idea to do a lot of historical/cultural research to avoid foul-ups.
This sounds great! Unless you're writing a memoir, you aren't expected to have identical lived experiences to your main character. Sensitivity readers are important and respect for the cultures/ethnicities/religions is too. Write the story you want to write. Rose sounds like a wonderful heroine.