by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Some things I keep thinking about these days as I develop the first book in a four book (at least) series.
- Motivation & Writing Female Characters
The better my storytelling ability gets, the more I find myself dwelling on motivation and how to construct interesting characters — usually female. I find developing female characters a lot more interesting than male characters because it’s so much more of a challenge to believably reverse engineer the personality and motivation of a female character (as male author.) And anyone who tells you to “just write a male character and flip the gender pronouns later” is full of shit. That’s a trite, pat, way of encouraging skittish male authors to write more female characters when, in fact, writing a female character as a male author is hard as shit. - Gender & Hero Politics
To write an effective Hero (Protagonist) for a story, they need to move the plot along. So, at the moment, I have my Heroine being rather passive at the climax of the story. I have come up with a way to make her far more active, but something occurred to me — there’s a reason why you see a lot of mom’s saving kids stories, but not a lot — if any of — of children saving mom stories. The implication is if a young man saves the metaphorical princess that they marry and live happily ever after. So, it’s weird to think that a son might save a mom from the dragon. But a mom saving a child (son) from danger fits the idea of a mother’s love. - Writing An Interesting Female Character Is Tough
I love to think up really interesting female protagonists, but given where all these stories are set, I really need to explain how is that all these out-there female characters could reside essentially in the same place when in real life you don’t often run into a woman as interesting as I’ve thought up. It’s not like there are all these Lisbeth Salanders running around Sweden. I have come up with a reason why these three women I need to exist would do so near each other, but I really need to think about the consequences of them being such iconoclasts. Men are socialized to be the Hero, while women — at least up until fairly recently — have been socialized to be the Princess who needs to be saved. For a real life woman to buck this very potent social construct would come with some significant downside for her on a personal level.
