Yzabel / October 24, 2005

Since I’ve been developing this female character recently, and spotted an interesting thread about it on the NaNo forums (yes, again) yesterday, I’ve started to think of this some more. I suppose that it would be especially valid to examinate female characters written by male authors, yet being a woman doesn’t always mean that we can write our own sex perfectly, so anything would go. What makes female characters annoying? What makes them look like bad stereotypes? What details would turn them into bad or insipid characters, that wouldn’t necessarily produce the same effect with a male protagonist?One author who definitely turns me off on this specific point is Robert Jordan, like I’ve already mentioned a few months ago in my Likeable Charactes post. All his female characters, without exception, are boring at best, seriously irritating at worst. They all end up looking like each other, on top of it. They’re bossy, ordering everyone around, rolling their eyes while repeating “Men!”, whining when people don’t jump at their command, and, in general, absolutely obnoxious. And smoothing their skirts a lot. I can’t even remember the last time I smoothed my skirt (trying to desperately pull it a little lower after discovering that carrying the heavy laptop bag on my shoulder was making it go higher than intended doesn’t count). In a nutshell, these female characters are just stereotypes from the feminazi end of the spectrum—the other end being filled with the fragile creatures whose most major role can only be to end up in the hero’s bed.Read More

Yzabel / October 22, 2005

Something very weird happened in the past few days, discretely at first, then more and more quickly: one of my very secondary characters said she wanted in with a more important role, and not only did she demanded that, she also gave me reasons as well as plot and background elements for me to do so.It’s really an eerie feeling. I’ve often heard that an author can consider having done a good work when her characters acquire a life of their own, so to say, but I never had this happen to me in such a way. This one wasn’t supposed to go very far in the story—in fact, she was even to die in one of the first scenes: a person out of the past, who’d be regretted, but wasn’t involved in the rest of the plot. I don’t know yet if she’d be really essential; she desperately wants in, this I’m sure of. Now that I think of it, she’s anyway not the kind of persona to remain quietly in the background.Read More

Yzabel / October 20, 2005

I’m worried about a certain type of scenes: the ones that can’t really be shown through action, simply because the characters need to be in a quiet situation to live them. I’m worried that they may seem boring, compared to the rest—boring, or inappropriate, or looking too much like a lecture.It can’t be helped, really. Depending on the kind of story, at times the characters will learn certain things that can’t be presented otherwise than through another character, a book, a precise source of data… and it’s not during a fight or an escape scene that they’ll find the information they need. For instance, I’ve always disliked stories in which the heroes are thrown into an unknown world or situation, and accept it as if it was perfectly normal (read The Fionavar Tapestry to see what I mean: “Oh, you say you’re a mage coming from another world? And we need to go there with you for the 50th birthday of the King? Okay.”). No kidding, how would I react in such a situation? I’d ask questions. I’d ask a hell of a lot of questions. I’d bother the natives until they tell me why I’m here, what is “here”, how is the world ruled, how this and how that. It’s the kind of questions I’d ask, and I’d ask them expecting an answer longer than just a few words. This would imply sitting and talking, or at least doing it during an event that would be quiet enough for us to talk, such as a walk, riding horses, being in a subway train, or whatever else can work. When answers need to be given, the author must give them. No escape here.Read More

Yzabel / October 19, 2005

Some time ago, I had been wondering about my lack of desire to describe one-time characters, but after having recently spotted a discussion on the NaNoWriMo forums, I came to realize that, all that simply, I don’t describe characters much, even the main ones, and especially when it cannot come in a natural way (when I write in the first person, among other things, unless one walks in front of a mirror or has a really striking feature that comes as important in a given situation, I very much doubt any of us would mention their brown hair or blue eyes in passing).No matter how I want to consider it, I’m always torn regarding how and when I should describe my characters. In first or even limited third person, it doesn’t come to me as natural that a character would immediately describe or notice how the others look like, unless she finds herself close to them (in terms of distance, not of relationships), has nothing better to do, has the time to observe them, or is hit, as said above, by a specific feature. I try to reason the way I’d do it myself: I don’t meet someone average and think “he has blue eyes, she has red hair”. This is what makes it awkward for me, in a way—it’s easy, in theory, to describe a person, but to make it in a natural way is much trickier. We pay attention to what isn’t ordinary. How many of us would really be able to tell the color of their friends’ eyes? We don’t exactly waste time scrutinizing their physical aspect, even on a first encounter. Our minds register appearances, but not in a conscious way (at least, not in my case, unless I’m of these people who don’t pay attention to the facial features, but to the persona herself?).Read More

Yzabel / October 11, 2005

I’ve found out that depending on the stories I write, there’s a severe lack of what I could call a “balance of the sexes” in them.One would probably think that, being a woman, my main characters would be women, or that the secondary characters at least would be. Well, it’s not necessarily true for me. I have an ongoing story where there’s close to no significant female characters in the first part, and the ones who really play a role are behind-the-scenes plotters whose role get unveiled much more later. I didn’t do that on purpose, it’s just the way the characters themselves imposed their presence to me, so to say. I have many female characters leading the way in other stories of mine, so I know I’m not allergic to women—only in this specific story are the main characters male (the females who do appear, on the other hand, aren’t there for romance purposes; creating a female character just to put her in the hero’s bed is something I’ve always, well, have had problems to envision, because it seems so shallow for this poor woman!).The reason why I mention this is because I once gave the first chapters of said story to read to a friend, and got told that it was weird to see me write about male characters, and not about strong female ones. I can’t remember exactly what was said (and it wasn’t said in a nasty way, it was simply a remark in passing), but I know it sounded as if it was surprising coming from me. I’m not sure if I appeared like a hard-line feminist at the time, or if it looked weird because I had been writing about strong women characters before. I’ve just remembered this today, as I was drafting character sheets for another project.Is there a problem with a lack of balance of the sexes in a novel? Personnally, I generally don’t care: as long as the characters are well-developed and make sense in their respective roles, I think the author reached his/her goals with them. However, I can also envision that a reader would feel miffed at not seeing his/her own sex represented more in a specific story; one thing many people tend to look for, consciously or not, is “someone to identify with”, and as such, the lack of significant presence of their own sex in a book could throw them off… perhaps. I’m not really sure about that. I just know that until now, I had never really given the matter a thought. Isn’t it a little weird?.novel, women, writing