how u rite grrl????

Before you complain about the title of this blog post, please know that my first choice was “Sam Sykes Touches Women.”

You’re welcome.

Anyway, as he and I are both wont to do, my good friend Mark Newton has posted a discussion and I, the literary mosquito that I am, have swooped down to thrust my proboscis of opinion into his jugular and gorge myself on his intellectual blood so that I might lay my malaria-ridden blog eggs.  As Ana, of the Book Smugglers, points out in her very positive review of his new book, City of Ruin, fantasy is one of those genres possessed of instances of female characters that are…underwhelming or unconvincing.  Though I quite like Ana’s descriptions of heroic vaginas and men with breasts.

Anyway, that mosquito metaphor has undoubtedly put you in the mood for a good discussion about female characters, so let’s have ourselves one.

In my opinion, if there are going to be problems with an author’s female character, they typically rise at the inception of said character.  More specifically, the problem occurs when a writer sits down, furrows his brow thoughtfully and asks: “How do I write a great female character?”  If this conversation revolved around a car at a repair shop, this question would be the rough equivalent of the mechanic reaching into your engine, pulling out a dead cat and saying: “Well, there’s your problem.”

As I said in Mark’s discussion, the idea that there is some magic, elusive idea of femininity that can be grasped, boiled down into a stew and force-fed the character doesn’t sit well with me because it relies on the patently false idea that all women are the same.  In order for you to write someone identifiably female, you’d have to write someone that fulfilled certain obligations that were well-acquainted or synonymous with what we thought women to be.

You’ve undoubtedly figured it out already, but that’s called stereotyping.  This is not a good thing.  Besides the extreme offensiveness to whoever you are stereotyping, it’s insulting to the reader that you might they couldn’t tell the difference.  And beyond all that, it commits that most heinous sin of diminishing tension in the story and thus diminishing the story itself.  If someone is easily identifiable as a stereotype, you can probably predict everything they do as easily as you could predict the punchline to a lame joke.  It’s not a good idea.  It makes people angry and it’s sloppy writing.

How do we go about writing women, then?  It’d probably be more accurate to say, how do I go about writing women, since all I can offer you is my own process and account (if someone else wants to give me their own, I’d love to hear it).

As ever, it all goes to motive.  I’m going to have to ask you to stay calm for a moment and read on past what I’m about to say, but this is the most accurate way I’ve heard it explained.

Girls fart, too.

If you haven’t shut down your browser out of anger or rushed off to confirm this statement, let me explain: there is no such thing as gender-exclusive motives.  We might lean one way or another (in our society), but a lot of the times, women and men desire the same things: love, power, acceptance, success, life, safety and so on.  What makes the character interesting is how they react to those desires (and gender can certainly come into play here).  At any rate, the character’s foremost motive should probably not be: “lol im a girl”

In short, to write a good female character, write a character first and a female second, not the other way around.

There’s another problem we often see, though: the total denial of femininity.  This is where the “men with breasts” issue comes into play.  You write a good character and she avoids everything you know is bad: she doesn’t pine over men (she might even be a bad-ass, man-hating Amazonian), she doesn’t wait for men to come rescue her, she performs every bit as good as the men…and she’s still not very popular.  Why?

Because the character is still not a character first at that point.  Her motives are still based off of what men do and thus, she rings hollow, with no real desires for herself.  It’s unrealistic and stupid to have a women exist just to provide men something to do, but it’s just as silly to have her act as though men don’t exist at all.

Some girls like boys!  It’s true!  I’ve seen it happen in my own house. And people like to read about girls liking boys, and boys liking girls, and people just liking people.  Romance is popular for a reason: we like to see people fall in love.  It makes us happy.  And in fact, if a woman wasn’t interested in men (or anyone) at all, we’d probably think she was mighty weird and unless there was a reason for that weirdness, we’d quickly lose interest because we just couldn’t relate to her.

Romantic tension, resolved or unresolved, is a big reason why we get involved in characters.  We want them to succeed in everything and, usually, if they can’t save the world or even themselves, we’d like to at least see them happy with someone for awhile.  Hell, you can even that someone be the chief motivation for a female character, but you (and the reader) has to know why that is her motivation.  It can be as easy as her being utterly smitten (though that might not satisfy a lot of people), to her rebelling against someone else, to her just connecting with them real well and she wants to protect that dearly.

As a brief addition: someone brought up the idea that women in the medieval societies are based off of aren’t equal to men and that it’s not always genuine to act like they are.

It’s fantasy.  You can make your own society.  That can even be a society where men and women aren’t equal, but you need a reason and a motive for it.

Basically, what applies to female characters applies to all characters.  You can have them do literally whatever the hell you want, so long as their motives are sound.  It’s when they lack motive that readers have a problem, because if they lack motive, they lack purpose, and if they lack purpose, why the hell are they are?

The answer?

“lol shes a grl obv”