DonRocko and I have started going to Emerald City Comic-Con (ECCC). This year was the first time I realized there were also writing panels at the convention. And wow, was there ever some great stuff to attend! The next few sets of notes will cover what I'd hoped to get to sooner ... but such is life. *sigh* For a more detailed excuse, please see my first post of the year.
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The Hero’s Journey: Writing Fiction with a Female Protagonist
Sharon Skinner, Jenn Czep
Moderator: Bob Nelson (publisher, Brick Cave Books)
“We are people first and gender comes after.” – Sharon Skinner
How does
the Monomyth feed into the stories today?
The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell’s
original monomyth
- Feeds into our need for story and the way
we tell story, relate to story
-
How it helps us to learn and grow
-
But Campbell was writing as a man at a
time when all of our heroes were men
-
So his idea of the hero’s journey is still in many ways one-sided.
Call to adventure – takes you out of
comfort zone
-
At some point you go into a new realm
-
Adventures, helpers, etc
-
At some point you succeed, and bring
something back to your people
The Heroine’s Journey
-
Basic premise: the female’s inner journey
is internal
-
More emotional
-
Not necessarily an adventure
What Matters Here
- A hero’s journey needs both the masculine and feminine perspectives
-
The more balanced a hero’s journey is, the
more satisfying it is
-
So it may involve internal journeys, yes,
but also external journeys.
-
The most satisfying journeys encompass
both the internal and the external.
BN: Jenn,
Blackstrap is a female captain pirate at a time not known for female captain
pirates. Want to talk about it?
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JC: Not true. Piracy was not all men.
-
One of the first female entrepreneurial
choices was piracy.
-
Women know how to run a business. But they
weren’t allowed to own business, or have rank, unless they married.
-
But they had the skills, so piracy was an
excellent option.
BN: Sharon,
Kira comes from a very specific examination of the feminine hero. Want to talk
about it?
-
Kira came as a character SS followed
around
-
Her stories are very layered. A story,
patriarchal norming, navigation of the established system and taking the system
apart
-
Used Kira’s story for thesis in Master’s
in Creative Writing
-
Fantasy and SF as resistant text for young
people – resistant text that pushes back from the social messages youth are
getting – gives young women a place to go
Audience
Question: Resistive text: what you were reading years ago was male-based. Did
that make it difficult to get inside the minds of your characters?
-
JC: started reading a balance – Wrede’s
Dealing with Dragons
-
Also, reading male characters – you can
relate to them, that sense
-
SS: Read a lot of Heinlein, etc, very
patriarchal bases, male SFF – didn’t hurt her any, but didn’t clue her in
enough when she wrote the first version of her book, The Nelig Stones. Fell
into the female protagonist trap – where if you’ve been fed these messages all
your life you write the female that needs to be rescued. But also still reads
male character stuff. Nick Fury YA,
Audience
Question: JC, when researching Blackstrap, did you have difficulty researching
female pirates?
-
Yes and no. Western pirates, yes, but
Eastern pirates had a wealth of information
-
Also, has a friend with a PHD in pirate
history
-
Some of what the women historically did
was crazier than the stuff she wrote
Audience
Question: So what constitutes a strong female character?
-
A strong female character isn’t much
different from her male counterpart
-
She’s someone who owns their own destiny
by the end of the book
-
They have to own it and they have to be
willing to own it
-
As a writer, write a character who can be
tempered through the challenges of the fire they face.
-
Character needs to start in a place where
they have room to grow and become that character they need to be at the end of
the book
-
They have what they need to have, but need
to be tempered by the fires of all of the obstacles they face
-
And the fire that tempers them is what
makes them their own instrument to take on their own destiny
-
That’s the most satisfying – so what can
grow into so they need to be at the end of the book
Audience
Question: Do you need to be masculine to be a hero?
-
JC: Not the case at all.
-
Game of Thrones: Strong female characters
are strong in every way a fem character can be strong. Even Cersei. A strong maternal
character. Even if it means killing everyone else off. This is a strength women
hold.
Audience
Question: Masculine in the sense of being nice, instead of just being perceived
as bitchy?
-
Sansa’s trying to fit into society, play
by society’s rules with the cards she’s been dealt
-
About being in their environment, finding
their way within the system – they can be disliked, but they’re doing what they
can with what they have
Audience
Question: Resistant texts – how do you write female antagonists without parroting
the bad guys in society?
-
SS: Has a female character in Healer’s
Journey doing what she thinks she needs to do to make her way in the world, but
people hate her – what matters is that the character is real enough.
-
The key is keeping it real, and making
your characters fully faceted individuals.
-
If an antagonist is too all bad, they can
come across as not real. Make them real.
Audience
Question: Sansa as a Strong Female Character – she has very little agency,
everything’s directed by outside forces. Can you write a character who is strong
despite choices being made by outside forces?
-
Can be done, but again, you just have to
make them real
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Ask yourself: whose journey is it really?
Audience
Question: What typically do male authors get wrong from a female perspective,
and can you think of any that get it right?
-
Joss Whedon. But he gets it all right.
-
Nowadays we’re seeing more male authors
who are getting it more right.
-
Back, looking at comics, they’re not
getting it right.
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Garth Nix – Sabriel – incredible
protagonist
-
Neil Gaiman and Arthur Golden also get it
right
-
Example of getting it wrong: CS Lewis – Perelanda
series – “Now, because I’m becoming a real woman, I can give up my frivolous dreams
and become a real mother.”
Audience
Question: Do you find it harder writing internal strength, or external
strength?
-
SS: It’s the balance of both matters. In
the character arc, growth must be internal and external for them to become that
instrument. Sometimes that means learning to swordfight, sometimes that means
learning to nurture.
-
D&D books, not much internal growth –
some readers like that
-
Some prefer emotional rollercoaster
-
She likes both.
Audience Question: Resistant texts – how to make a character likeable
but strong – we also should read widely. Can you think of texts we shouldn’t
read?
-
SS: Twilight. No real character arc. Prime
example of this.
- The Host – likewise, the character didn’t
change.
- Very escapist
-
This is a matter of taste
-
Mentor texts: You read widely, eclecticly,
to learn how to do it well, and then you also read ones where you learn what
NOT to do. Texts you can decipher and dissect. Go back and read those pages
that teach you.
-
As a painter, you learn to copy the
masters. As a writer, when she had to learn to write a battle scene, she picked
several battle scenes from books she’d read and liked, then picked them apart
for how they pulled it off. Copy the techniques. Example: George R.R. Martin
gives an eagle view of the battle, then makes it personal.
-
Likewise if you get thrown out of the
narrative when reading a book, think of it as a bad example, and *don’t* do
that.
Audience
Question: What do you think of writing trans* protagonists?
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JC: Hasn’t written any, but it’s important
to remember that the journey is still just as much about the internal and
external journeys. It’s about being human first. Gender isn’t about what they
are, it’s about who they are, so you can show what growth there is, and what
character arc there is, regardless of who they are. It’s a different character
arc for that person.
-
SS: It’s all about love. About being
human, not being afraid to take that leap, especially when you’re going into a
territory your character clearly knows, even if you don’t.
Audience
Question: Exercise in gender perspective – wrote a scene with a male
protagonist, then changed all the pronouns to female. The story completely
changed. Is this how society views it? Or do you need to write men and women
differently?
-
SS: When you’re writing a character, it’s
about how effeminate or masculine you want your character to be, male or
female, and the strengths you choose to give them. Not so much about gender as
it is about their masc/fem sides of who they are
-
JC: The reader will read it in their own
way. Pirate books – many of the characters go either way, and it’s not about
sexual pref but more about power, and with one villain with a fem harem, it was
about having power over others. But if she wrote that same character as male,
it would be a flat character. But some will read it differently.
-
Sharon: We all see the word though our own
lenses. As a writer we hope that our readers get lost in the world, but if our
readers see it slightly differently.
-
Sharon: Human motivation is what drives us
all. It’s all about motivation. You have to make sure the motivation behind
what your characters are doing is what makes them real.
How to
pull away from the tropes?
-
JC: One example: Cimorene – rebellious
princess, but with mad skillz. Arya Stark, too.
-
SS: Take the trope and turn it on its ear.
-
Take the cliché character and change
something drastically about them, give them some major skill or huge character
flaw, an Achilles heel, and switch it up.
-
Character tests and sheets are helpful
tools, but don’t let them run your life or tell you how to write or not to
write.
-
The biggest tool is to write your heart
out. If you don’t enjoy spending time with your characters, then you need to rethink
what you’re doing. But don’t let the
rules and the tools get in the way.
-
Every book will tell you how to do it, but
that’s just how the one author did it. We’re artists, first.
Messages
to men when they grow up: about being strong, etc. But if you’re writing strong
female characters, is it a challenge to write strong males?
-
Characters should balance each other out.
-
The difficulty was not in making the male
characters weaker or the female characters overpoweringly strong – it’s about
making them both strong in diff ways.
-
About being human, not about gender.
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JC: Male characters aren’t necessarily
unlikable if they’re very strong or very weak, but something should offer
assistance to fem character. If they’re weaker, there’s got to be a strength
within them that isn’t a physical strength. They could be mentally adept.
-
SS: Stumbled in allowing both male and female
characters to be their own people – stumbled because didn’t want her character
to have too much help, needed more tempering – want her to have a character
arc. Struggled with figuring out who’d
the characters would be together, how their strengths and weaknesses would play
off one another. Figuring it out now.
When
writing trans* or intersex characters, or say aliens without identifiable sex
or gender – How do you avoid problems
with them becoming just objects for traditional characters who bounce
their gender issues off other characters?
-
SS: whatever issues they struggle with,
temper them, put them through the fire.
-
Get back inside the head of your character
and find out what that journey really is.
So what’s the key to writing a female hero?
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SS: Butt In Chair. Make the person human.
Whoever they are, whatever they are, make them human, as real as possible with
strengths and flaws.
-
Make sure you throw lots of obstacles and
challenges at the characters. Temper them as much as possible. Make them the
sword they need to be at the end of the story.
-
JC: Pay attention to people. The realistic
characters you’re surrounded by.
-
Characters are very much us, but also the
people around us. If you know a strong woman in your life, pay attention to
what makes them strong.
