This will not be a cheat sheet, because there are no cheat sheets for this. Instead, it will provide useful perspectives and questions to ask yourself about your characters, and some important recommended reading/watching.

Sexual assault is a topic that’s famous for being badly done by male writers. It’s often inserted into stories to provide motives for male characters, or create drama and tension that serves the plot while somehow not affecting the victim/survivor character at all.

It took me a while to work out why I’m bad at writing queer experiences. After all, I’m bi. I qualify as queer. I am the B in LGBTQ. I should be farting rainbows and sneezing glitter and flying the flag as well as the rest of them, and perhaps the fact that I’m not is evidence of some kind of failure to be properly queer. That’s the feeling I’ve always had.

But it turns out I’m bad at writing queer experiences because, until recently, my experience of being bisexual has been erasure.