One of my subagents thinks for some reason that it would be helpful for me to present, instead of direct criticism, a discussion of my own writing weaknesses and what I do / want to do about them, thereby lightly grazing some fraction of what I would say directly about your writing. The subagent thinks that this will be less likely to make you defensive. Is it off-base?
Very possibly on-base. I think my brain is worried that other people will read this and say, “Ah, Eliezer is a patriarchalist writer” instead of, “Oh, well, invisibly behind the scenes Eliezer was trying to juggle this and a dozen other writing problems and desiderata simultaneously and this is what we got.” Talking about your own analogous writing problems seems much more likely to lead the wider audience to the second conclusion.
I had no particular intention to talk past you; as we both know, conveying meaning using words is hard, and I might not’ve understood your intended main point.
I’m more comfortable with female characters myself. Both Luminosity and Radiance have girl protags; the Elcenia books are a mix, and of the finished ones there’s two female protagonists, a male one whose girlfriend spends a lot of time in the spotlight, and an ensemble cast that only mostly belongs to the male character I think of as its center. I could make up reasons why that isn’t something I did on purpose. Luminosity and Radiance are fanfiction. I didn’t invent Rhysel, Julie did; Julie also invented Talyn, and his story spends more time focusing on his romance than Rhysel’s did; Ilen’s not a strong enough character to hold up his own entire book until the very end of the plot; Ehail hardly counts because she’s so wispy and much of her book is a vehicle for plot that just happens conveniently nearby her...
But that’s a cop-out. I could have written Luminosity with a rationalist Edward if that had struck my fancy, if I’d been willing to lean a little farther away from the canon conceit. I could have given Bella a son instead of a clone of Renesmee with a less silly name, that was completely open to me to have her make that choice when she had the choice. If Ilen’s too weak to carry a book without help from his sisters and his mother and his niece and his girlfriend (and his brother and his dad, some), why does Ehail hold up hers so much better, when she’s at least as wobbly a personality? (Is it because she has a more supportive love interest? Not entirely.) When I rebooted Elcenia, it was open to me start anywhere. I didn’t need to start with Rhysel, or start with Rhysel’s summoning—I could have written a book about Narax or Revenn or someone first. Heck, writing a book about Narax’s backstory might have been a stronger opening, and I only just now thought of it. Talyn has a lot of complex motivations besides his girlfriend’s existence. Does she really need that many perspective chapters? Does he really need to do so many things because of her? Probably not; and this might make his book weaker or stronger that he does, but the reason I did it that way wasn’t because I made an artistic choice, it was because it felt natural to spend about a third of Talyn’s book in Leekath’s head.
(I’ll try to stick more to Luminosity examples; I don’t know how much Elcenia you’ve read.)
I think I’m reasonably good at keeping tertiary characters of both genders on an even footing. In Luminosity, Mike Newton and Jessica Stanley are equivalents; Sulpicia and Afton are equally irrelevant mates-of-villains-who-matter.
When I promote them to greater importance, my male characters start to fall apart.
Bella finesses Edward’s motivations almost immediately and is too much of a force for him to exert any meaningful pressure however much she loves him, and by the end of Radiance he’s her glorified radio. Jacob is not smart enough or special enough to keep up with Elspeth except in the literal sense of accompanying her throughout some of the story, and he doesn’t even get a chance to win her affection on his own, he coasts on Chelsea’s “help”. Where canon makes Jacob a force to be reckoned with at least as wolves go, I passed him over completely in the first book until the very end, in favor of his sisters who get literally no appearances in the original quartet. My hand wasn’t forced there. I could have made Jacob the alpha and left Rachel and Becky in college and Hawaii where Meyer put them.
Alice is cleverer and more charming than Jasper, Esme is less of a caricature of naive goodness than Carlisle, Emmett’s motivations are shallower than Rosalie’s. Aro is powerful and dangerous, but rather than bother with giving him a competence upgrade to challenge my girls, I threw in an original (female!) witch-vampire wildcard. When I needed a random non-witch Volturi, I picked a name with no attached character out of the back of Breaking Dawn, didn’t know it was a man’s name, and invented a half-sympathetic female dancer instead and had to retcon why she would be called “Santiago”. Maggie the lie detector is important and adorable with a strong voice and a personality. Charles the truth detector—who has comparable presence in canon—is a throwaway vaguely creepy flashback line in the mnemic blast. Liam’s subordinate to Siobhan and Tia’s subordinate to Benjamin—guess which couple gets to do anything meaningful? Heidi and Corin both have combat-relevant powers—guess who’s still relevant at the Volturi’s last stand?
I try to compensate for this. I don’t work that hard, because I have lots of other things to focus on, and I know I’m one author in a literary environment that is pretty thoroughly dominated by other people’s male protagonists, but I do try. The two Elcenia novels I’m currently in the middle of have one male and one female protagonist, and the former’s story is longer—but come to think of it, Mallyn is very thoroughly shaped by the females in his life. He’s closer to his mother than his father; his sisters than his brothers; his girlfriends, crushes and platonic female friends than his male friends. I could disclaim responsibility here too—Mallyn’s not originally mine either, he’s Julie’s, she could have changed that if she’d decided he was gay or more comfortable with his dad or more interested in befriending Kaylo than Korulen, but I’m writing this now. If I want to rebalance this, I need to downplay Sashpark, play up Aaseth, downplay Rithka and play up Nemaar, downplay Finnah and play up Eran, postpone Kimmet’s introduction for as long as I reasonably can and try to build up Mallyn’s relationship with Gyre. I have the tools. But the male characters on that list don’t interest me as much; I don’t want to spend as much time talking to them through Mallyn’s lips.
(It will not surprise anyone, I imagine, that Elcenia has so many characters that I once named 200 of them from memory.)
I can write a variety of male personalities. Talyn and Jacob and—oh, let’s throw in a Goldmage character, Wiar—are all very different from each other and all unambiguous dudes. And all those personalities fracture a little under stress, when I try to zoom in on them. I can make this work for me. Talyn’s unstable, he goes off and does wild and arrogant things and he doesn’t have to act within a very narrow band of character traits for my betas to laugh and go “Talyn is being so Talyn!” Jacob’s an intellectual half-step behind everyone around him because he doesn’t have a vampire brain or massive intellectual gifts; when I don’t know what to do with him, I can have him struggle to catch up. Wiar’s gradually losing his memory and I only have to sustain him for a few more chapters before it would be inconsistent for him to have more than fragments of a personality left at all. And despite the fact that I can cover for myself like that, I wish I knew how to write male characters who were solid all the way through. Who react instead of going fuzzy in my head when things happen to them. Whose perspectives remain plain and whose motives remain followable at times when I’m now tempted to dip into their girlfriends’ perspectives instead. Who have voices, who will talk fluently through me—instead of being lists of traits that I compare mechanically against pressures and histories to see what permissible results get spat out.
[Is this helpful?]
Edit: It just occurred to me that I might be able to remove one of my crutches when I get around to writing some of the gay male protagonists I have waiting in the wings. There’s an Elcenia lead couple of boys I’ll get to once I’m deeper into the politics arc. But then, one of them has a dominant twin sister… you see how hard this is?
I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere as a way of finding out what background assumptions one has about gender.
Unfortunately, I have no obvious way of tracking down the cite, but I think the author found that when the male characters were given female pronouns, the amount of agency they showed became very unattractive. I don’t remember what the shift was when the male characters were given female pronouns.
On my first reading of Mieville’s Embassytown, I kept getting thrown out of the story because I couldn’t believe the protagonist was female. I think it’s because she was more interested in travel than in people. On the second reading, it wasn’t a problem.
A prominent pop-culture example is the Mass Effect sci-fi game series. Unless Commander Shepard’s gender is directly relevant (such as during romantic subplots), he/she will say the exact same lines whether man or woman.
Over five years and three lengthy and ambitious games, I’ve probably read hundreds of pages of people discussing every aspect of the series and its narrative. The single time I can remember anyone saying that ‘FemShep’ felt a bit off was in direct response to the above observation; outside of that, she was wildly popular and often named as a positive model for the writing of female protagonists.
Tangent: This basically does that. It doesn’t work perfectly on hpmor, though—it swaps the pronouns just fine, but only some of the names, so you have to not only remember that Harry is now Harriet but also do that without being thrown off by the fact that Hermione is still Hermione but with male pronouns. That’s patchable (eg, eg), but I don’t know that it’d be worth the trouble.
Grownup sexual issues in the sense of acquainting one’s genitalia with someone else’s body parts are (mostly) theoretical for (not too precocious) children! Issues of one’s sex are decidedly NOT. From a very, very young age—maybe for boys it doesn’t become non-theoretical until middle school, but I’d laugh at the idea that girls aren’t hyperconscious of gender expectations after the age of about five. MOR!Hermione is constantly comparing her relationship with Harry to “Romances” she has read, expecting herself to fill such a role under constant societal encouragement and reinforcement of how girls just act that way and melt in a variety of creative manners whenever they so much as think momentarily of love. That’s something she never ever would have been exposed to and acting upon if she hadn’t needed to visit McGonagall in December.
maybe for boys it doesn’t become non-theoretical until middle school
For many boys, gender is non-theoretical some years earlier than that, thanks to: ① adults pointing them at “boys’ toys” (trucks, guns, rockets, army men, footballs) and away from “girls’ toys” (dolls, ponies, kitchenware, jump ropes), and ② other kids, notably older kids, teasing boys as “sissies” or “girls” (!) if they stray too much outside of gender roles.
This post has been very educational to me. The people in my head are either direct copies of me or opaque blocks of remembered behavior by others. I’m not even confident I can tell the difference if someone else is writing them. The fact that it works like this for you is humbling. I wonder how much of that is talent, and how much is skill...
Hmm.
One of my subagents thinks for some reason that it would be helpful for me to present, instead of direct criticism, a discussion of my own writing weaknesses and what I do / want to do about them, thereby lightly grazing some fraction of what I would say directly about your writing. The subagent thinks that this will be less likely to make you defensive. Is it off-base?
Very possibly on-base. I think my brain is worried that other people will read this and say, “Ah, Eliezer is a patriarchalist writer” instead of, “Oh, well, invisibly behind the scenes Eliezer was trying to juggle this and a dozen other writing problems and desiderata simultaneously and this is what we got.” Talking about your own analogous writing problems seems much more likely to lead the wider audience to the second conclusion.
I had no particular intention to talk past you; as we both know, conveying meaning using words is hard, and I might not’ve understood your intended main point.
Okay, here’s my first pass at this.
I’m more comfortable with female characters myself. Both Luminosity and Radiance have girl protags; the Elcenia books are a mix, and of the finished ones there’s two female protagonists, a male one whose girlfriend spends a lot of time in the spotlight, and an ensemble cast that only mostly belongs to the male character I think of as its center. I could make up reasons why that isn’t something I did on purpose. Luminosity and Radiance are fanfiction. I didn’t invent Rhysel, Julie did; Julie also invented Talyn, and his story spends more time focusing on his romance than Rhysel’s did; Ilen’s not a strong enough character to hold up his own entire book until the very end of the plot; Ehail hardly counts because she’s so wispy and much of her book is a vehicle for plot that just happens conveniently nearby her...
But that’s a cop-out. I could have written Luminosity with a rationalist Edward if that had struck my fancy, if I’d been willing to lean a little farther away from the canon conceit. I could have given Bella a son instead of a clone of Renesmee with a less silly name, that was completely open to me to have her make that choice when she had the choice. If Ilen’s too weak to carry a book without help from his sisters and his mother and his niece and his girlfriend (and his brother and his dad, some), why does Ehail hold up hers so much better, when she’s at least as wobbly a personality? (Is it because she has a more supportive love interest? Not entirely.) When I rebooted Elcenia, it was open to me start anywhere. I didn’t need to start with Rhysel, or start with Rhysel’s summoning—I could have written a book about Narax or Revenn or someone first. Heck, writing a book about Narax’s backstory might have been a stronger opening, and I only just now thought of it. Talyn has a lot of complex motivations besides his girlfriend’s existence. Does she really need that many perspective chapters? Does he really need to do so many things because of her? Probably not; and this might make his book weaker or stronger that he does, but the reason I did it that way wasn’t because I made an artistic choice, it was because it felt natural to spend about a third of Talyn’s book in Leekath’s head.
(I’ll try to stick more to Luminosity examples; I don’t know how much Elcenia you’ve read.)
I think I’m reasonably good at keeping tertiary characters of both genders on an even footing. In Luminosity, Mike Newton and Jessica Stanley are equivalents; Sulpicia and Afton are equally irrelevant mates-of-villains-who-matter.
When I promote them to greater importance, my male characters start to fall apart.
Bella finesses Edward’s motivations almost immediately and is too much of a force for him to exert any meaningful pressure however much she loves him, and by the end of Radiance he’s her glorified radio. Jacob is not smart enough or special enough to keep up with Elspeth except in the literal sense of accompanying her throughout some of the story, and he doesn’t even get a chance to win her affection on his own, he coasts on Chelsea’s “help”. Where canon makes Jacob a force to be reckoned with at least as wolves go, I passed him over completely in the first book until the very end, in favor of his sisters who get literally no appearances in the original quartet. My hand wasn’t forced there. I could have made Jacob the alpha and left Rachel and Becky in college and Hawaii where Meyer put them.
Alice is cleverer and more charming than Jasper, Esme is less of a caricature of naive goodness than Carlisle, Emmett’s motivations are shallower than Rosalie’s. Aro is powerful and dangerous, but rather than bother with giving him a competence upgrade to challenge my girls, I threw in an original (female!) witch-vampire wildcard. When I needed a random non-witch Volturi, I picked a name with no attached character out of the back of Breaking Dawn, didn’t know it was a man’s name, and invented a half-sympathetic female dancer instead and had to retcon why she would be called “Santiago”. Maggie the lie detector is important and adorable with a strong voice and a personality. Charles the truth detector—who has comparable presence in canon—is a throwaway vaguely creepy flashback line in the mnemic blast. Liam’s subordinate to Siobhan and Tia’s subordinate to Benjamin—guess which couple gets to do anything meaningful? Heidi and Corin both have combat-relevant powers—guess who’s still relevant at the Volturi’s last stand?
I try to compensate for this. I don’t work that hard, because I have lots of other things to focus on, and I know I’m one author in a literary environment that is pretty thoroughly dominated by other people’s male protagonists, but I do try. The two Elcenia novels I’m currently in the middle of have one male and one female protagonist, and the former’s story is longer—but come to think of it, Mallyn is very thoroughly shaped by the females in his life. He’s closer to his mother than his father; his sisters than his brothers; his girlfriends, crushes and platonic female friends than his male friends. I could disclaim responsibility here too—Mallyn’s not originally mine either, he’s Julie’s, she could have changed that if she’d decided he was gay or more comfortable with his dad or more interested in befriending Kaylo than Korulen, but I’m writing this now. If I want to rebalance this, I need to downplay Sashpark, play up Aaseth, downplay Rithka and play up Nemaar, downplay Finnah and play up Eran, postpone Kimmet’s introduction for as long as I reasonably can and try to build up Mallyn’s relationship with Gyre. I have the tools. But the male characters on that list don’t interest me as much; I don’t want to spend as much time talking to them through Mallyn’s lips.
(It will not surprise anyone, I imagine, that Elcenia has so many characters that I once named 200 of them from memory.)
I can write a variety of male personalities. Talyn and Jacob and—oh, let’s throw in a Goldmage character, Wiar—are all very different from each other and all unambiguous dudes. And all those personalities fracture a little under stress, when I try to zoom in on them. I can make this work for me. Talyn’s unstable, he goes off and does wild and arrogant things and he doesn’t have to act within a very narrow band of character traits for my betas to laugh and go “Talyn is being so Talyn!” Jacob’s an intellectual half-step behind everyone around him because he doesn’t have a vampire brain or massive intellectual gifts; when I don’t know what to do with him, I can have him struggle to catch up. Wiar’s gradually losing his memory and I only have to sustain him for a few more chapters before it would be inconsistent for him to have more than fragments of a personality left at all. And despite the fact that I can cover for myself like that, I wish I knew how to write male characters who were solid all the way through. Who react instead of going fuzzy in my head when things happen to them. Whose perspectives remain plain and whose motives remain followable at times when I’m now tempted to dip into their girlfriends’ perspectives instead. Who have voices, who will talk fluently through me—instead of being lists of traits that I compare mechanically against pressures and histories to see what permissible results get spat out.
[Is this helpful?]
Edit: It just occurred to me that I might be able to remove one of my crutches when I get around to writing some of the gay male protagonists I have waiting in the wings. There’s an Elcenia lead couple of boys I’ll get to once I’m deeper into the politics arc. But then, one of them has a dominant twin sister… you see how hard this is?
What happens if you write a female character then go back and change the pronouns?
I have never tried this. I don’t think it would feel comfortable.
I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere as a way of finding out what background assumptions one has about gender.
Unfortunately, I have no obvious way of tracking down the cite, but I think the author found that when the male characters were given female pronouns, the amount of agency they showed became very unattractive. I don’t remember what the shift was when the male characters were given female pronouns.
On my first reading of Mieville’s Embassytown, I kept getting thrown out of the story because I couldn’t believe the protagonist was female. I think it’s because she was more interested in travel than in people. On the second reading, it wasn’t a problem.
A prominent pop-culture example is the Mass Effect sci-fi game series. Unless Commander Shepard’s gender is directly relevant (such as during romantic subplots), he/she will say the exact same lines whether man or woman.
Over five years and three lengthy and ambitious games, I’ve probably read hundreds of pages of people discussing every aspect of the series and its narrative. The single time I can remember anyone saying that ‘FemShep’ felt a bit off was in direct response to the above observation; outside of that, she was wildly popular and often named as a positive model for the writing of female protagonists.
Tangent: This basically does that. It doesn’t work perfectly on hpmor, though—it swaps the pronouns just fine, but only some of the names, so you have to not only remember that Harry is now Harriet but also do that without being thrown off by the fact that Hermione is still Hermione but with male pronouns. That’s patchable (eg, eg), but I don’t know that it’d be worth the trouble.
I wonder how you’d do if you were writing (smart) children to whom most grownup sexual issues were theoretical.
Grownup sexual issues in the sense of acquainting one’s genitalia with someone else’s body parts are (mostly) theoretical for (not too precocious) children! Issues of one’s sex are decidedly NOT. From a very, very young age—maybe for boys it doesn’t become non-theoretical until middle school, but I’d laugh at the idea that girls aren’t hyperconscious of gender expectations after the age of about five. MOR!Hermione is constantly comparing her relationship with Harry to “Romances” she has read, expecting herself to fill such a role under constant societal encouragement and reinforcement of how girls just act that way and melt in a variety of creative manners whenever they so much as think momentarily of love. That’s something she never ever would have been exposed to and acting upon if she hadn’t needed to visit McGonagall in December.
That’s why I said ‘sexual’ not ‘gender’.
For many boys, gender is non-theoretical some years earlier than that, thanks to: ① adults pointing them at “boys’ toys” (trucks, guns, rockets, army men, footballs) and away from “girls’ toys” (dolls, ponies, kitchenware, jump ropes), and ② other kids, notably older kids, teasing boys as “sissies” or “girls” (!) if they stray too much outside of gender roles.
One time I wrote a short story where the child protagonist and eir best friend literally do not have genders yet, does that count?
This post has been very educational to me. The people in my head are either direct copies of me or opaque blocks of remembered behavior by others. I’m not even confident I can tell the difference if someone else is writing them. The fact that it works like this for you is humbling. I wonder how much of that is talent, and how much is skill...
Most of it is practice. I’ve had the named characters kicking around in my head for much of my waking time for years.