by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m extremely paranoid and self-conscious when it comes to writing the female characters in this novel I’m working on. My greatest fear is that I’ll somehow get some element of being a woman wrong and I’ll be held up by some Tik-Toker as yet another example of how men shouldn’t even write female characters at all.
My heroine looks like a younger version of Olivia Munn.
Ugh.
Just in the last few days, I’ve had two notable instances of this situation come up.
One was I have a very specific vision of what my heroine looks like and, as a part of that, I want to convey to the reader some sense of her bosom. Now, some context — Stieg Larsson spent an entire scene going into detail about Lisbeth Salander’s relationship to her breasts, so it’s not like it can’t be done. My fear is that in my quest to give the audience a clear understand on that front, that some of the squeaky wheels reading will think I’m obsessed with boobs. (But, in all honesty, who isn’t?)
I’ve managed to figure out a few ways of indicate what I want to show the audience without wallowing in gratuitous verbiage about breasts.
Meanwhile, the other issue I’ve had to address dealt with periods. I have a really interesting provocative scene that talks about that issue head on, but I’ve kind of been stressed out all day about it because I was afraid that there was some aspect of it all that I just was missing. I finally talked to a woman about the specific plot point I was concerned about and she assured me I had it right.
Anyway, I fear that, by definition, any attempt on my part to write about women will be poo-pooed by some of the more “woke” elements of the audience for no other reason than I’m a “CIS white male.” If I had some other, more exotic background they wouldn’t blink an eye.
But, lulz, slings and arrows and all that.
