writing women's stories
Jan. 25th, 2013 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanate(...syphoning off some related topics, as nobody wants two months of ephemera links in the same post...)
There's been a bit of a thing lately in the circles of fandom that pass along thinky links on checking one's assumptions as a writer wherein people are responding to a succession of claims that sexism in fantasy is authentic. And by "authentic," a number of people seem to mean that stories depicting women's lives as part of what is going on in the world aren't worth writing. (I say, go review your Chaucer...)
In any case, I only catch the periphery of this stuff, but there are a few of the bits I've seen that circle around the way things come out of my head when I write:
Historically authentic sexism in fantasy. Let's unpack that. and a couple responses on tumblr; the tor.com article mainly points out that "history" as written is generally by men, speaking about men, and leaves out a lot of the stuff they didn't get, weren't there for, or decided not to think was important because the women were doing it. (Strangely, you get this if you're trying to sort out everyday life or people who weren't rich enough to be literate or concerned with writing, too.) The responses go on to point up some medieval perspective on how working families actually used to function, economically. Incidentally, this sort of everyone contributes model is *still* the case in a lot of parts of the world. (I'm not talking about the double-income most-of-mom's-check-pays-for-daycare stuff you see in suburban America.)
Your default narrative settings are not apolitical is a bit ranty, but has a whole lot of fascinating historic anecdotes about women who did things. No, the cross-dressing soldier is not a myth invented by feminists in the 1970s, etc.
Writing about ladies and the unseen menial characters points up a bit about how people who aren't knights or otherwise on top of their society can actually be at least as interesting, and possibly know more about how the world works, anyway.
So, my journal, my writing... At one point when I was in high school, my best friend asked me why it was that I always wrote about princesses. I probably argued that I didn't (which was also true, though the ratio was a bit skewed) but the much older me thinks the point she was trying to make is a good one. There are plenty of stories to be told about high politics and knights and noble ladies and all that, but on the whole the rest of the world is kind of on that on already. I've always had a bit of an aversion to doing things that feel like someone else has done them before, and honestly, my ancestors were mostly celts and quakers and good anglo-saxon peasants, and just because you've heard of Charlemagne (from whom I might also be descended) doesn't mean that no one else had interesting lives.
I don't know if it's really apparent to anyone else yet, but I pretty much write women's stories, with occasional children's perspectives thrown in. It's not particularly intentional; it just happens. I can make up any number of psychoanalytic excuses if you find those entertaining, but on the whole the important part is that it's the bits around the domestic edges of things that come out of my brain: the cranky old woman's view of the lovesick teen, the kid who gets himself mixed up in a witches' feud by being nosy, the girl whose mother leaves the house carpenter for the prince and doesn't come back. The thing I've been managing about a paragraph a week of since before Miss Radiator started moving enough to feel begins with a laundress suffering from severe late term insomnia because her kid won't stop kicking her. And then you add in magic, and alternate worlds, and when the Wild Hunt comes calling, maybe there's only one person in the house still awake for a reason that has nothing to do with status...
Actually, I have an awesome boys' story about a scouting party in a tight spot trying to recapture their Centurion's escaped slave, but it's stalled out in that "no idea what happens next" phase. Possibly in part because boy stories are not really my thing.
Digressions aside, the point I think I'm trying to make is that part of the quest for diversity in fantasy is not just adding color and non-western-european influences (though these are excellent things too, and worth thinking of.) Part of what I write and would like to see more of is the bits where the magic intersects with people's everyday lives. It may be easier to go adventuring if you're coming of age, or if adventuring is your job, but that doesn't mean that adventures don't intersect the lives of those who are older, or parents, or pregnant, or goatherds and metalsmiths and weavers instead of princes. These are normal stages of life: time does not stop because you're having a child, and normal professions: on the whole, the fisherman is more likely to notice odd things going on with the ocean than the king is. And honestly, one of the places I most consistently get story ideas is from going to classes at Pennsic where people talk about bits of medieval European history that I've never heard of before. There's a wealth of untapped inspiration out there that gets largely ignored for the warriors and barmaids that are usually about as historically accurate as Ren faire entertainment: sometimes great fun, but not the best basis for serious worldbuilding.
There's been a bit of a thing lately in the circles of fandom that pass along thinky links on checking one's assumptions as a writer wherein people are responding to a succession of claims that sexism in fantasy is authentic. And by "authentic," a number of people seem to mean that stories depicting women's lives as part of what is going on in the world aren't worth writing. (I say, go review your Chaucer...)
In any case, I only catch the periphery of this stuff, but there are a few of the bits I've seen that circle around the way things come out of my head when I write:
Historically authentic sexism in fantasy. Let's unpack that. and a couple responses on tumblr; the tor.com article mainly points out that "history" as written is generally by men, speaking about men, and leaves out a lot of the stuff they didn't get, weren't there for, or decided not to think was important because the women were doing it. (Strangely, you get this if you're trying to sort out everyday life or people who weren't rich enough to be literate or concerned with writing, too.) The responses go on to point up some medieval perspective on how working families actually used to function, economically. Incidentally, this sort of everyone contributes model is *still* the case in a lot of parts of the world. (I'm not talking about the double-income most-of-mom's-check-pays-for-daycare stuff you see in suburban America.)
Your default narrative settings are not apolitical is a bit ranty, but has a whole lot of fascinating historic anecdotes about women who did things. No, the cross-dressing soldier is not a myth invented by feminists in the 1970s, etc.
Writing about ladies and the unseen menial characters points up a bit about how people who aren't knights or otherwise on top of their society can actually be at least as interesting, and possibly know more about how the world works, anyway.
So, my journal, my writing... At one point when I was in high school, my best friend asked me why it was that I always wrote about princesses. I probably argued that I didn't (which was also true, though the ratio was a bit skewed) but the much older me thinks the point she was trying to make is a good one. There are plenty of stories to be told about high politics and knights and noble ladies and all that, but on the whole the rest of the world is kind of on that on already. I've always had a bit of an aversion to doing things that feel like someone else has done them before, and honestly, my ancestors were mostly celts and quakers and good anglo-saxon peasants, and just because you've heard of Charlemagne (from whom I might also be descended) doesn't mean that no one else had interesting lives.
I don't know if it's really apparent to anyone else yet, but I pretty much write women's stories, with occasional children's perspectives thrown in. It's not particularly intentional; it just happens. I can make up any number of psychoanalytic excuses if you find those entertaining, but on the whole the important part is that it's the bits around the domestic edges of things that come out of my brain: the cranky old woman's view of the lovesick teen, the kid who gets himself mixed up in a witches' feud by being nosy, the girl whose mother leaves the house carpenter for the prince and doesn't come back. The thing I've been managing about a paragraph a week of since before Miss Radiator started moving enough to feel begins with a laundress suffering from severe late term insomnia because her kid won't stop kicking her. And then you add in magic, and alternate worlds, and when the Wild Hunt comes calling, maybe there's only one person in the house still awake for a reason that has nothing to do with status...
Actually, I have an awesome boys' story about a scouting party in a tight spot trying to recapture their Centurion's escaped slave, but it's stalled out in that "no idea what happens next" phase. Possibly in part because boy stories are not really my thing.
Digressions aside, the point I think I'm trying to make is that part of the quest for diversity in fantasy is not just adding color and non-western-european influences (though these are excellent things too, and worth thinking of.) Part of what I write and would like to see more of is the bits where the magic intersects with people's everyday lives. It may be easier to go adventuring if you're coming of age, or if adventuring is your job, but that doesn't mean that adventures don't intersect the lives of those who are older, or parents, or pregnant, or goatherds and metalsmiths and weavers instead of princes. These are normal stages of life: time does not stop because you're having a child, and normal professions: on the whole, the fisherman is more likely to notice odd things going on with the ocean than the king is. And honestly, one of the places I most consistently get story ideas is from going to classes at Pennsic where people talk about bits of medieval European history that I've never heard of before. There's a wealth of untapped inspiration out there that gets largely ignored for the warriors and barmaids that are usually about as historically accurate as Ren faire entertainment: sometimes great fun, but not the best basis for serious worldbuilding.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-01-27 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-27 02:33 am (UTC)I actually went through a weird self-image shift when I got married because I was no longer really aligned with the virginal or sorry-she's-not folk-song narrators and similar character types (despite being a decade or so older than all of them anyway), and I think a lot of my current character trends started from that. There's something to be said for being bumped out of one's mental comfort zone, I guess.