Articles like the link you posted are definitely a great help in portraying characters with disabilities or backgrounds we have no experience of. When writing about someone of a different culture or gender I've always tried to draw a lot on situations that make use of universal emotions.
We may not get things 100% right but if we do our best and go at it in a respectful manner we can keep our readers in our fictional worlds.
One of the authors who most made me want to write was Susan Johnson with her Braddock-Black series. I grew up on stereotypical "Cowboys & Indians" and I was blown away by her Native American characters because they were "real people" not Hollywood stereotypes. She had incredible cultural detail that I was eager to read because she made me love the characters and connect with them on an emotional level.
It takes a lot of work and effort to find those details that make your "different" characters believable and it seems to me that the author you mentioned who was satisfied with the idea that "They all look like that" was taking the easy way out.
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We may not get things 100% right but if we do our best and go at it in a respectful manner we can keep our readers in our fictional worlds.
One of the authors who most made me want to write was Susan Johnson with her Braddock-Black series. I grew up on stereotypical "Cowboys & Indians" and I was blown away by her Native American characters because they were "real people" not Hollywood stereotypes. She had incredible cultural detail that I was eager to read because she made me love the characters and connect with them on an emotional level.
It takes a lot of work and effort to find those details that make your "different" characters believable and it seems to me that the author you mentioned who was satisfied with the idea that "They all look like that" was taking the easy way out.