What techniques, tricks or tools do you use to come up with characters, names, backgrounds, etc., in order to avoid having everyone in the 'verse be a middle-aged white male? To put it another way, how do you get diversity without the distribution feeling artificial?asked by Logical Chimp
TL;DRDiversity comes from explicitly asking casting for it and from naming characters by mixing first and surnames from different countries, partly at random, since national boundaries have dissolved in the Empire.
It's part of casting, for sure. When we talk to the casting director, we very specifically ask for diversity.
It's definitely the case when we're naming characters, because one of the ideas is that international boundaries have dissolved in the Empire. Now it's more about planets. So before, where you would have these names that were segregated by what country you were from, those boundaries have definitely eroded away. So as we develop names, it's kind of fun sometimes. A good method is to take a first name from one country and a surname from another country and combine them in interesting ways.
Yeah, I personally keep a stack of magazines at my desk and sometimes I'll just open one up to one page and choose a first name, open it up to another and choose a second name, and just try to put something together that way. Making every name a reference or named after someone, it takes too much thought. Sometimes when you're writing, you just need a name, and sometimes it's best just to make it slightly more random.