The Epic Fantasy and Female Characters, Part Two
by kateelliott on Sep.17, 2009, under Kate Elliott and Ken Scholes
KATE asked yesterday:
Ken, I’d be curious to know if you have any thoughts about how female characters fit into epic fantasy, and if your own thinking on this issue has changed over time?
KEN answers:
I do have some thoughts, but I’m the first to admit that this is an area where I’m evolving as a writer.
I actually subscribe, to a degree, to the notion that genders are “wired” differently, brain-wise, in many ways but with a great deal of latitude. There are some interesting tests over at the BBC website, for example, that help identify a brain’s gender-wiring. I don’t know how accurate these tests are but it’s a fascinating way to spend a few hours. Oddly enough, I test out as more female-brained than male brained, which is interesting since my wife has frequently suggested that I am the girl in our relationship. [Interpolation by Kate: I took one of those BBC brain wiring tests and came out dead even between “male” and “female.” Go figure.]
Speaking of my wife, she actually played a key role in the creation of the female characters in the Psalms of Isaak. I based the main female protagonist, Jin Li Tam, largely on Jen. And as she was reading (and I was writing) the first half of the book, she noted that there was an absence of women in the novel apart from that character. Her comment led to the creation of both Queen Meirov of Pylos — a minor character certainly — and Winters, who captured my interest so thoroughly at the end of the book that I knew she needed a starring role. In Canticle, she becomes my second female protagonist in the series. And I love that while Lamentation’s cover features the leading man of the book riding out with his Gypsy Scouts to action, the cover to Canticle features three of the novel’s women gathering in the quiet of a winter wood to parley. I’m delighted that Tor saw the value of featuring these characters on that cover and Greg Manchess did a fabulous job capturing the spirit of that scene.
I can’t speak beyond my own experience as a reader and writer. As a young fellow, I cut my teeth reading lots of old sword and sorcery and fantasy written at a different time in our culture, stories written by men (or women writing under men’s names) populated largely by men solving their problems with swords and bravado, rescuing damsels in distress with all the old familiar stereotypes. And when I tackled my first novel, I really gave little thought to gender or anything other than just getting that first novel written. I had no idea at the time that it would sell and do as well as it’s doing…and didn’t see the lack of female characters until my wife pointed it out. While creating Winters, I think, addressed some of that it really just showed me a blind-spot leftover from my reading life and transferred into my writing life. I’d always intended Jin Li Tam to grow beyond her role as her father’s spy and courtesan as she became Queen of the Ninefold Forest, but adding Winters to the story arch provided a nice place for me to expand even further. Then, in Canticle, I add the characters of Ria and Rae Li Tam. In Antiphon, I add Ire Li Tam,. Who knows where I’ll end up by the end of the series? And the next series I’d like to tackle, based on my short story “Invisible Empire of Ascending Light,” will feature more opportunities for me to stretch myself in that regard.
The truth is, I didn’t really tackle writing female point-of-view characters until rather late in my short fiction days. I was operating under that notion of “writing what you know” and I wasn’t sure I could write women well. At the front end of the series, I felt less comfortable writing female characters as well. I sometimes wonder if some men choose not to write female characters out of a fear of “getting it wrong.” Still, I think it’s important and from the start, I’ve had a posse of strong female writers and readers giving me feedback on the initial drafts of the books. That helps, I think. And in the end, it seems that I write my characters the same whether they are male or female. They are people, first and foremost, wrestling with internal conflicts brought about and challenged by the external conflicts that are pressuring them into action and growth. I think our goal as writers is to help readers suspend their disbelief and a world that lacks diversity is harder to believe. I don’t suggest for a second that writers should portray an ideal and just society — worlds where all are equal and treated fairly — in their work though that also has its place in good fiction. Writers should write what they wish to write. But in my opinion the struggle for fairness and equality, the heroes and heroines that rise up and make a difference in the societies they live in, should be believable and a real voice in the story. That said, I think it’s difficult to do and sometimes we get it wrong even when we try not to.
Tomorrow: Ken asks who is writing with a strong cast of female characters.
Related posts:
- Fantasy and Female Characters, Part Three KEN: So for those of us out there in that learning curve, who are the writers who are giving us the strongest, broadest cast of female characters? Do they tend to be female authors? Which male authors are doing it well and what books, series or authors do you recommend...
- Epic Worlds Without Women? KATE: I’m not a big subscriber to the Men are from Mars Women are from Venus school of human nature and gender personality types. This may be because I was a tomboy growing up, before certain cultural changes including the widespread advent of sports for girls made the word “tomboy”...
- And our next guests are… Thanks again to Paolo for joining us on Babel Clash. For the second time in Babel Clash’s short history, we have two featured authors joining us for our next geeky debate. I’m very pleased to welcome Kate Elliott and Ken Scholes. Kate is the author of the Crossroads and Crown...
- Thank you! Ken & Kate, it has been a pleasure having you on Babel Clash. It’s been a great conversation, and I really appreciate the amount of thought and time put into it. Do you want to take your last message or two and recommend Canticle and Traitors’ Gate to those fans...
- On Writing the Novel, Part One KATE: My bad. My spouse travels a lot — and I mean a lot — for his work, and he arrived home Tuesday evening from the Gilbert Islands (google the battle of Tarawa, if you’re interested in where he was) and I totally forgot to post. So, here we go....
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September 17th, 2009 on 2:11 am
Props to you for facing up to and working on that lack. Everything you say here — including how you approach writing characters, regardless of gender — increases my (already existing) desire to check out your series. (I’ve been meaning to for a while, but, well. The research demands of my own work mean I’ve read almost zero fiction lately, except the book that sparked my own SF Novelists post for this month.)
I don’t suggest for a second that writers should portray an ideal and just society
This is why I went off Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books as I got older, and why I’ve never been keen on Star Trek. An ideal and just society doesn’t interest me; I like my (fictional) societies with plenty of internal conflict. But there’s a big difference between a culture oppressing women (or ethnic minorities, or whoever) in the narrative and an author erasing them from the narrative.
September 17th, 2009 on 5:38 am
Thanks Marie. I try. I’m with you on the ideal and just society — where’s the dramatic tension in that? Give me conflict! Give me societal problems to overcome!
I think “erasing from the narrative” might be strong as it implies they were there in the first place and removed intentionally. In most cases, I don’t think Boy Writers who struggle here intend to do this. I think it really is a blind-spot in the imagination when we’re crafting our fiction, that groups of people including women sometimes un or under represented. Or again, that fear of getting it wrong for some. But I think that once we see it and tackle it, we hopefully get better as we open our imaginations up wider. For example, I just added my first same sex couple into ANTIPHON. I think the more real and in-depth our worlds and characters are, the more compelling the fiction will be.
September 17th, 2009 on 6:16 am
Thanks for the mention of that BBC test. I love that sort of thing!
I picked up Lamentation mostly because I love Greg Manchess’s art, and enjoyed reading it. I’ll look forward to the next book.
Jin Li Tam was a little problematic at first, since she was a courtesan and an agent of her father and so much under the control of men, but she definitely grew beyond it. (All that mindless allegiance to her father… one wonders why. I’m not sure I’d put up with it without a lot of mind control. I suppose I’m too much a product of our modern society, even though I’m Asian and can sometimes play ‘dutiful daughter,’ just not very well!)
I find I prefer male characters, perhaps partially due to having grown up reading all those adventures with sword-swinging heroes. Or maybe because my brain tested slightly male? Who knows?
Anyway, fascinating topic!
September 17th, 2009 on 6:28 am
“I’m not sure I’d put up with it without a lot of mind control.”
You’ve nailed it on the head, April! The sons and daughters of House Li Tam are ALL their father’s spies, honed from birth to be such. I think folks pick up on it most with Jin Li Tam because she’s a POV character — though I hope people see that she is questioning her role by the end of the book. But throughout the book and series, we also see that his sons are also being used as tools to the point of sacrificing their lives gladly for their father’s will. And we learn something about Vlad himself in CANTICLE.
Good thoughts! And yeah, those BBC tests are something. A co-worker’s Mom in my day job turned me on to them. I test out firmly in the female camp.
September 17th, 2009 on 9:45 am
I could not agree more that a barrier for male writers writing female characters is that desire to “not get it wrong.” It’s lot more difficult for me to write from a female POV, but I’ve attempted it a few times with middle success. I’ve even tried a couple of contemporary stories, and those seem to be easier, but as soon as the trappings of fantasy get around it, it suddenly becomes much more difficult. I’ve tried cop-out workarounds, and I’ve even made room for a very strong female culture in my worldbuilding (based loosely on Lysistrata), but I’m nervous about confronting it, because I don’t want to just write a bunch of dudes with boobs.
So it’s good to know that my ambivalence is shared.
And I’m also looking forward to reading Lamentation, which should arrive on friday.
September 17th, 2009 on 2:31 pm
My intent here isn’t to go around linking to myself, but it’s easier to do that than repeat this entire post. I can name plenty of stories where the female characters annoy me because the author seems to have been trying to Write Women, but I honestly can’t think of a single book I’ve read (or movie I’ve seen, or whatever) where the female characters seemed to me like dudes with boobs; Vasquez in Aliens, who’s the worst I can think of on that front, still seems to me like a woman who’s adapted to a male-dominant military culture. But that’s because I view gender as being highly mutable depending on context. (Speaking of which — the responses here have already demonstrated the uselessness of that “gender-wiring” test. The results regularly fail to map to sex or social gender.)
Ken — you’re right that my phrasing was a little strong; I went for the rhetorical parallelism, to the slight detriment of accuracy.
But I do view it as something of an erasure, since (absent a setting that really doesn’t have women in it), the female sex is at least implied to exist in that world, even if they aren’t written into the narrative. The erasure happens at the level of thought, not writing; our archetypal blind-spot-possessing Boy Writer mentally edits women out of the world, either by dismissing their lives and concerns as uninteresting to his story, or by never giving them any thought in the first place.
The solution to that is posts like this, and stories that show how it can be done. The solution to the fear is harder, but I for one am in the camp of saying that it really isn’t as tough to “get right” as people think.
September 17th, 2009 on 2:51 pm
I should add — at the risk of being too wordy; too late! — that there is a way in which I see female characters frequently done wrong. It isn’t men-with-boobs syndrome; it’s women-as-male-fantasy. That one’s all over the movie world, unfortunately.
September 17th, 2009 on 3:27 pm
I second Marie’s thought on “woman as male fantasies”. A large number of examples fall into the “whore with the heart of gold” stereotype that one finds in mainstream fiction as much as in genre. I have heard male writers say that they quite consciously write female characters to be what they think women -should- be. None of these were major writers, though.
This isn’t just a genre thing. Look at Hemingway’s mostly unbelievable females for a literary example.
I have also heard women writers worry about “getting the men right” in their stories. The source of this fear, no matter what the gender of the writer, always seems to be the belief that men and women are intrinsically different somehow, whether one calls it “brain wiring” or not. I don’t believe in that intrinsic difference. We are members of the same species subjected to the same conditions of existence. We are educated and conditioned in different ways from the moment of birth, practically , but a writer can take that conditioning into account consciously. IF he or she wants to. Some don’t want to.
September 17th, 2009 on 3:45 pm
Adam, what have you found gets in your way when you put fantasy trappings around female characters? In what ways do you feel you struggle? Is it in their roles? what they can and can’t do? How they think or react? Can you expand on the statement that it becomes much more difficult? In what ways do you think you need a strong female culture to have women rather than a book filled with dudes? I’m genuinely curious, because I think there might be ways to figure out where assumptions are getting in the way of writers.
September 17th, 2009 on 3:51 pm
I, too, think of “erasure” as something that happens at the conceptual level.
September 18th, 2009 on 2:27 pm
Hey Kate,
I’m not sure. I can relate to females in a contemporary setting; I just base them loosely on people I know and I think it works alright. I’m still not 100% confident with it, but I can write it without over-thinking.
But as soon as I try to put them in my fantasy world (which is, just FYI, Greek culture inspired, rather than medieval), I get very conscious of the role they’re being relegated to; I don’t want to shove them in the background, but I don’t want to overexpose a female character whose function is to cook, or clean, or to do anything strictly domestic. But neither do I want to make them as martially motivated as some of the men.
It might be a problem of world-building, really. I haven’t thought out exactly what the society permits, for men or women, really. I just know that my confidence is poor when I attempt it. I’ve done it once or twice (I have a single chapter that I’m happy with, so far), but the flow isn’t there like it is for a male character.
I hope that was helpful and not just rambling.
September 18th, 2009 on 5:31 pm
Adam, no, that all makes sense. I guess — I think — that what some of us are arguing here is two fold:
1) no matter what “role” people are relegated to, they are still people with emotions and thoughts who will try to make sense of the world and their place in it. Their “character” will still be as strong as that of, say, a “male lead” who is, forex, the prince.
2) Why would it be overexposure to recognize and weave into a plot line the life of someone whose work might be what we define as strictly domestic? See also, 1) above.
2a) People who have grow up in the modern developed world with its labor saving devices may not recognize how vital “domestic” tasks are to, well, life. How many people (in all too many places today, too) were hungry many days. Or, how tasks we now associate with “the female domestic” may have been male tasks, or tasks with a high degree of social status in another time and/or place.
Those things are all what, I think, some of us mean by the conceptual “erasing” of people’s lives, and also what I mean by certain kinds of unexamined assumptions.
September 18th, 2009 on 6:01 pm
And
2b) would it be overexposure if the character doing some manner of work we identify as domestic were male? But whose story then is drawn into the larger plot?
September 19th, 2009 on 2:41 pm
Hm. I guess I’m just making it more difficult for myself. I always think that the moment a female reads a chapter that I’ve written from a female POV will spot it immediately and begin picking it to death, for one reason or another.
But I guess I just need to write it an see what happens. It seems silly to limit myself based on something so silly.
Thanks though, Kate. It’s been helpful.
September 19th, 2009 on 6:31 pm
Adam, it’s interesting. I think almost every writer has *something* she or he worries about that they’ll get wrong. For me, it’s worrying that people will pick apart my prose and say, “well, she’s just not a very good stylist and she puts together words so clunkily” so I think you’re absolutely right: sometimes we just have to write it and see what happens. I’m betting you’re doing just fine with your female characters. Good luck!
August 16th, 2010 on 8:54 pm
thanks man for the great info