Comments on: The Epic Fantasy and Female Characters, Part Two

By: kateelliott

kateelliott — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:31:44 +0000

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!

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:41:02 +0000

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.

By: kateelliott

kateelliott — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:01:53 +0000

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?

By: kateelliott

kateelliott — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:31:34 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:27:49 +0000

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.

By: kateelliott

kateelliott — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:51:36 +0000

I, too, think of “erasure” as something that happens at the conceptual level.

By: kateelliott

kateelliott — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:45:36 +0000

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.

By: Katharine Kerr

Katharine Kerr — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:27:44 +0000

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.

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:51:23 +0000

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.

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:31:58 +0000

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.