Yeah, duck for cover, the old noggin has jumped into overdrive. In the past several weeks I've read a few blog posts about the place of women in stories. JT Ellison's post at Murderati yesterday is the one that really kicked my brain in gear. http://www.murderati.com/blog/2009/8/7/what-the-fk-is-ladylike.html
By place, I mean how they act, the type of back story they should have but something else I've noticed is that writers tend to use female characters as either a victim, a femme fatale, or the comic relief, especially in the mystery genre. The truth is, not all women fit in these molds and except for similar body parts, and they're not exactly divided equally either, we're all different. Yet, when writing these characters, authors tend to use a basic stereotypical woman. And not just male writers, but female writers, too.
I grew up with a great-grandmother, two grandmothers, seventeen aunts and a slew of female cousins and not one of them was alike. True, each generation of women has that generation's beliefs stamped on them as a whole, but as a person they were nothing alike. I grew up seeing marriages that lasted more than fifty years, divorces, widowhood and each woman involved reacted differently to their changing or unchanged situations.
I've seen sweetness, bitterness, and downright bitchiness and sometimes that's just in one woman. Not all women are nurturing, some of them should never have had children, while others embraced every child that came within hugging distance. Not every woman is a victim, and some of them can be the worse predators you've ever crossed paths with.
I also had an equal number of male relatives and just like women, they, too, had their individual quirks. They were fighters and cowards, macho swaggering and quiet observers, caregivers and selfish. Exactly like their female counterparts.
So what am I saying? Treat all your characters, male and female, as individuals, people with the whole range of human emotions and personal quirks. It'll make for a richer, fuller story and resonate with the real truth of what being human is all about.
10 comments:
I read JT's post as well. I have a female Cop protag and she's not tortured at all. If anything, she's idealistic. Now, some of her friends have demons in the past but not her. I wanted her to be normal.
Normal's good. I often wonder if readers consider themselves normal so they don't want to read about normal. I always loved Miss Marple and Tuppance and Tommy because they all led such normal lives outside of solving murders.
I wonder if it was because of the PI genre that we were suddenly hit with so many protags with baggage? I recently read Block's "A Walk Among the Tombstones" and I kept wishing he'd have skipped the AA meetings because they didn't add anything to the story for me.
Once upon a time PIs had no little or no past (Sam Spade, Marlowe, Archer). The current trend (since at least Matt Scudder and Dave Robicheaux made it into print) is for the character, male or female, to bring baggage. This, too, shall pass, probably moving to a trend of "normal" PIs. Although, is normal all that interesting? Don't we read to get the hell away from our own normal?
Well, it's all up to the individual writer, innit? I think Robert Bailey did a superlative job of creating a 'normal' PI in Art Hardin, a character with a strong wife who owns and runs her own business, two typical teenage sons -- and made all of those characters both believable and interesting.
But - even if a character starts out as 'normal,' in a series the darkness tends to build up over several books and baggage forms. Look at what happened to Elvis Cole. He still cracks wise, but he's not the same carefree ace detective he started out to be 20 years ago. The dark events of several books have overtaken him. Me, I love to see a character mature like that, but some people want only Stephanie Plum-like characters: no baggage ever, no maturation. So she may have normal attributes (eats too many donuts, e.g.) but since she's stunted, she's hardly normal.
This is a longwinded way of saying I entirely agree with your last paragraph.
I think that is a real problem with series characters, Corey. They tend to rely too heavily on their faults or quirks and in the process become stagnant. I love characters who change over the course of a series, who grow up and learn from the things they do. And yet, many readers prefer that each book remain the same as the one before, though I've heard a lot of Stephanie Plum fans complaining of late.
I guess if you're money or agent driven you have to keep to the formula that pays the bills, but I do adore the author who lets their characters grow up and be changed by the circumstances of their "lives".
"Not all women are nurturing, some of them should never have had children, while others embraced every child that came within hugging distance. Not every woman is a victim, and some of them can be the worse predators you've ever crossed paths with."
An excellent point and when it happens, none of the friends or family of a woman that goes off the deep end in a newspaper story, sees this coming.
There was a girl near Sacramento about a month ago who when her mother forbid her to see her boyfriend, her and her boyfriend went "Mickey & Mallory" on the mother. There were no outward signs indicating that this would happen at all, though I imagine there are existing texts and emails that led up to the act.
I think it's the world image of what a woman or a man should/could be that keeps people from seeing what's right in front of them, Cormac. People are horrified when a woman like Susan Smith does the unspeakable, but the men who kill their pregnant wives, well, that's to be expected even though it just as mind boggling as what Smith did.
when i read it, the question popped in my mind...why to think about how to treat your character and follow some rules or advise given/set by someone.
Why not to make your characters real instead, readers dont want a 'character', readers what individuality, and that too a normal one. As a reader I want to relate to the character. As a writer I want my readers to relate to what I write and feel for my characters.
Welcome to the corner, Lena! I think with genre writing, readers expect certain things to be present and having a disturbed past or a bad habit, like drinking, is just one of those items.
And I agree with you that there's no reason a writer can't make their characters normal except that agents and publishers expect different in order to sell the book that certain readers expect. Me, I love to be surprised by the characters.
Everyone has a backstory that shapes the way they look at life and it doesn't have to be tragic if the writer does it well. And I guess that's the real key. The writer has to make it all believable, even normal.
A normal person isn't what some consider 'normal'. All people have quirks, or backstory of some life-changing event or about to go through one. All characters, whether male or female, need to have that character growth arc in the story. A less than perfect woman will be able to change herself. A perfect woman might end up cracking under the pressure.
Excellent points, Barabara!
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