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@hope-ann

Ooh, perfect! I’m doing some of this in my own story (which is fantasy, granted, but does have other races in it).

I think the first thing to keep in mind is that you will almost never be able to avoid offending everyone. There’s always going to be someone who takes something the wrong way. So don’t freak out too much to start with, because there are some things that just can’t be helped.

I’m not positive whether the question is mainly about describing appearance or just writing the character in general, but both can be addressed (at least partly) by looking at them through the lens of your other characters. In my story, one of my main characters’ appearance is based loosely on Japanese (ignoring the fact that he has green eyes, of course 😛 ). Though he comes from a violent tribe, he himself is kind and gentle. Since it is from another character’s viewpoint, however, I simply describe him the way she would see him. I would avoid any terms that would be derogatory in modern usage, of course, but just plain saying things the way a character perceives them is easy enough. Here’s what my main character thinks when she first sees him in my current draft (in the middle of a bandit attack, which he and two others intercept):

This third boy directed vivid green eyes shaped almost like a cat’s at the leader. The man suddenly went pale.
“Sirakani,” he murmured. Then he raised his voice as he vaulted himself over the other side of the wagon into the forest. “Run!”
My heart froze in midbeat. Sirakani. One of two bands of tribes from Birkata in the north, past the mountains and the Teraviti River. The band whose incessant raids on Cresban villages drove the area to join Aimoni as a dependent region or die.
The man the blond boy was fighting took one look at the slightly built boy on his comrade’s shoulders and took off. The last bandit finally managed to throw him and, after sighting his assailant, turned tail and followed his fellow bandits into the pine forest.
The Sirakani boy dropped to the ground in front of me, crouched like a bobcat. As he pushed his black hair from his eyes and rose, walking towards me with the knife, I tensed. But he simply knelt in front of me, sliced through the rope around my wrists, and helped me up.

Later on, she gets to know him personally and no longer gives much thought to Sirakani stereotypes. However, other characters that have had bad history with the Sirakani are not so quick to trust him. I think it can be important to make sure that you don’t cut things like racism from your story for fear of offending someone when it would make sense for it to be there. On the contrary, we need stories that point out the detrimental effects of these things.

And of course, the biggest thing to remember is that your characters are people. Naturally, their nationality is going to affect them in some ways–in their cultural norms (a great element to tie in), in their relationships with others–but beyond that, you don’t want to worry about it so much that you lose sight of the character as a person. It’s easy to focus on the things you’re afraid of writing wrong, but probably the best thing you can do is not overthink it. Acknowledge the factor, but there’s no need to either downplay it or make a bigger deal of it than necessary. 😉

Those are my thoughts. Hopefully they make sense (and hopefully nothing I wrote was offensive. . . see, I worry about it too 😛 ).

@toklaham-veruzia I know your story has several nationalities in it, if you have any advice.