[Gary Wassner]

Hey Alison! I'm a noble male character!

I have very strong female characters in my books. And I frequently find that the characters who appeal to me most in in other author's fantasy are female as well. And I don't mean 'appeal' in any sense other than their strength, compassion and feeling for the earth. I try very hard not to stereotype any of my characters, though the tropes might seem traditional.

A lot of how any of us write depends upon our own emotional experiences in life, and upon our hopes and expectations regarding others. So the divide between male and female may very well be stong in some and weak in others.

My men might also be more ambiguous than say, Matt Stover's are. Sensitivity is a trait that is heroic for me, and my characterizations reflect that. I do not interpret it to be less manly, and I don't interpret physical dexterity and skill to be less feminine.

Sorry to be the odd voice in this thread, but I feel strongly about this subject.

[sillysod]

Excellent thread. I am sorry to say I haven't read ANY of the writers Alison mentioned, but that's mainly because they aren't available where I live. Being something of an enthusiast about feminism, I was immediately interested in this topic.

I feel that while the representation of the sexes in books depends on the personal viewpoint of the author, their sex does make something of a difference.

One reason why this disparity is felt particularly in fantasy is the cliche (and not such a wrong one) that many fantasy fans are geeks whose knowledge of woman does not extend beyond seeing them at a distance of no less than 15 feet. For this reason, women are an alien species to them, and so they don't like them getting in the middle of the slashing and bashing.

Another thing is that I agree that women are sympathetic towards their male characters, portraying them as much less impulsive and obsessive than men are in real life, and I'm not just talking about fantasy.

For a particularly interested person, I'd like to point out Lisa Tuttle's book 'Panther in Argyll' and her essays as well, especially the latter. She makes rather wonderfully believable connections between SFF and feminism and masculinism. To say that her words illuminated my mind would be an understatement.

I feel that more fantasy books by women authors should be made available everywhere, because one thing fantasy needs today is unconventional thought, and this is one of the most important ways of presenting it.

Postscript: Unfortunately, my experience of fantasy written by women is the above-mentioned book, the books of JK Rowling and a few of Ursula LeGuin's stories. Which is why my comments should be taken with a pinch of salt.

[Rocket Sheep]

When I write, the males are mean and the females are meaner and tougher... and the relationships are never about luurve, they're about misunderstandings and compromise and manipulation and sometimes end badly... and messily... explains perhaps why I don't sell much.

[alison]

When I write, the males are mean and the females are meaner and tougher... and the relationships are never about luurve, they're about misunderstandings and compromise and manipulation and sometimes end badly... and messily... explains perhaps why I don't sell much.

You mean, Rocket, like Wuthering Heights? I just reread that novel for the first time for years, and I'm hard put to find characters crueller, meaner and more selfish than Cathy and Heathcliff. And boy does it end badly. (Lots of lurve, though.) Funny how people think of it as a romantic book. Aside from being handsome and smart, Heathcliff is sadistic, selfish, vengeful and avaricious to the point of miserliness. The other male hero, the narrator, is a vain wuss; and Edgar is just wishy washy. I don't think Emily Bronte was especially nice about men. Maybe a bit off the track here. But isn't the real clue about writing believable characters, whether they're men or women?

Ursula le Guin's late additions to the Earthsea books are very interesting takes on the man/woman question. Like critiques of her earlier ones. But yes, it's true that there are more interesting female characters being written than there once were. I love the female characters too in Miyazake's anime - great characters like the woman in charge of Irontown in Princess Mononoke, who is thoroughly ambiguous, sexy and strong, brave and ruthless, and yet does terrible things.

[KatG]

One of the reasons they started genre fantasy was to bring in more women readers, and one of the first places they went for fantasy authors were women writers working in sf or in children's fiction, like Le Guin, Norton, etc. Fantasy still has a much higher female readership than sf does, though I think the female sf writers are making nice in-roads.

One thing I've noticed just in general is that female fantasy writers tend to be more interested in characters and less interested in stuff. For instance, a male fantasy writer might spend five paragraphs instructing you on the various parts of a saddle and what they are for, whereas a female fantasy writer is more likely to just briefly describe the saddle and get the character up on the horse. It isn't that female fantasy writers don't bother with detail -- they can offer large chunks of info related to the story, but it's sort of the men like gadgets, women like people stereotype. But I have found that both male and female fantasy writers can do well with both male and female characters.

[alison]

That's pretty much male/female brain stuff, isn't it? I am certainly interested in relationship - between things as much as between people. But that seems to me to be a large part of describing what they _are_. I don't think that's just a gender thing, though the emphasis I place on relationship and context may well be. But also, one of the charms of fantasy for me is the "marvellous object" - the beautiful palace, the evil weapon, the jewel, the fab cossies that the girls get to wear...

[Lirva]

oh the cossies are great. i have great fun coming up with costume and possible costumes for female characters in some of my stuff. can get a bit distracting though must get on with actual writing (slap my wrist :p ) great fun though when i need something to take my mind off uni but ain't got the time or energy to sit down and write!

[Hereford Eye]

GW jumped in up above to claim he writes a strong female character and everyone lets that slide. Why?
Haven't read Gary's stuff so I am not critiquing his work here. I am interested in the notion of writing strong characters of the opposite sex. How does an author get Red Sonja to be something more than Conan with breasts?
I don't think I can say I write a strong woman character thought I can say that I try to portray women acting as women. The proof though is with the reader. The best part of reaction to Holbrook and my book of short stories is when people claim they cannot tell who wrote which characters. Actually they can if they pay attention to grammar and usage, but we both worked hard on bringing verity to the characters.
There was a panel discussion at the WorldCon in Tempe last fall about strong women heroines. The only male on the panel was poor Charles De Lint who almost got three complete sentences in edgewise. <Exaggeration there. He actually got five.> I'd sort of like to see a panel about creating strong male characters with all the panelists male except for a lone women. I suspect it would be as interesting a set of stereotypes as was discussed at the Tempe panel.

[alison]

Like your comments, HE. I remember very well, when I was very young, going to a talk where a woman talked about how she could not see how men could write female characters at all, and did not dare to write male characters. I was totally baffled: what is imagination for? (Also, I had just read Madame Bovary, who is one of the more compelling characters in literature, AND written by a man - if it was mpossible, why was she so real to me?)

I have had a few discussions on "strong female characters" in the course of writing my own books. It seems to be an imperative. There were continual suggestions that I remove practically any sign of vulnerability or flaw in my girl hero. I resisted most of those, but I thought it was odd: it was as if describing my character as shy or frightened, say, meant that she couldn't also be brave. (I thought those things made her braver). And with more complex contradictions, it got even worse. But this idea seemed to equate "strong" with, well, as you say, a rather one-dimensional Conan with boobs, rather than a character who is strongly present and imagined.

I actually didn't want to write a role model, but a fictional character who seemed, however fictional, to be also like a real human human being, doing things from her own imperatives; and I must say that think of male characters in the same way. Gender is certainly not the first thing I think about when I think about my characters, although I must say I am aware of those issues in my work.

Just a short anecdote on how these things can get surreal. My husband is a playwright. One of his first plays was about women, and was picked up by a feminist troupe in New York for a reading because they thought it was so powerful a statement about women. They got a bit of a shock when they found out it was written by a man (they thought his name must be Danielle) and he was forbidden to attend the reading of his own play, which was woman-only. (He was furious, which they thought was very male of him). I self-identify as a feminist, but I must say that this kind of thing strikes me as really silly, and very limiting for writers.

The idea of a panel on "strong male heroes" is strangely appealing...

[Hereford Eye]

My idea of a "strong" female character is one who deals with the issues in her life as best she can. She has opinions and beliefs and acts on them..and sometimes she is wrong. She can perform heroic acts; she can fight in battles; she can do all the things heroes can do because she has confidence in herself.
The other night on one of the endless TV news magazines there was a story on the Bad Water Marathon, a race through Death Valley and half-way up Mount Wilson, the race climbs 5,000 feet from the desert floor. The race covers more than 100 miles and takes more than 24 hours continuous running. From 2000 through 2003, a woman won the race beating both male and female competitors. She came in third in 2004. For the first time, at about the 90 mile mark, her female body did its monthly thing, sapping strength. She made no excuses, claimed no foul, just vowed to return next year. That's the physical part. As well as the emotional part.
If women heroes are not to be men with boobs, then women's issues and women's emotions need to be portrayed as events to be dealt with in the course of overcoming whatever else the plot throws her way.
Annie Proulx won the 1994 Pultizer Prize for Shipping News, the story of a man wrestling his demons. Do you suppose the Pulitzer panel happened to be all female that year? As far as I can tell - and I have not read them all - no man has won the prize for writing a book with a female lead. Bias, lack of skill, or male aversion to taking on the problem of writing a "strong' woman and getting it right?

Added after-thought: I trust the New York women paid him the royalties with a bonus for getting it right. There must be somethng about the name Daniel that facilitates writing about women. :D