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This is a rant more or less directly related to an ongoing conversation on rasfc.
(Brief context note: There is currently a certain amount of discussion on rasfc about whether or not women can convincingly write male characters. This irritates me.)
I hate, hate, hate with a passion the idea that there's something particularly difficult involved in writing a character who doesn't share one's traits. Any of one's traits; sex continues to be not a special case, though that's not the usual version of "sex" I mean when i say that.
I'm not writing women and I'm not writing men. I'm writing people, many of whom have sexes. Trying to wodge a character into a box defined by their sex -- or any of their other adjectives -- seems likely to cause them to break down as plausible people, because the questions come down to "does a man behave like that" or "does a Muslim behave like that" or "does someone with a degenerative bone disease behave like that", when the important question is, "Does Fred, the guy I'm writing about, behave like that".
Might Fred's maleness, his religion, his medical history have some impact on how he behaves? Of course. But that doesn't mean that I write Fred by calculating an intersection of the 'male' template with the 'Muslim' template and the 'denenerative bone disease' template; I write Fred by writing Fred, and the manifestations of those traits show up as they're relevant, rather than by crimping my thinking where they're not.
I don't have a template for male characters. I don't know of any things that hold universally true about men to start with, even if I thought it wasn't a completely fucking stupid way to go about things. As I said on rasfc, I can't think of a single rule for building such a template to which I do not know multiple exceptions, including "has XY chromosomes". (*waves at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
griffen*)
I'm writing from the point of view of a male character, primarily, for The Devil's Due. I couldn't write it back when I finished The Devil's Dance a few years ago. Not because he's male. Because he speaks in a significantly different register than I do; because I strongly suspect that he's significantly more intelligent than I am, besides.
He's not that hard to write, now that I have the hang of his mode of speech. He's damaged, driven, generous by nature; he is compelled to master every art he takes up or the closest he can manage to do it, because he is a perfectionist driven by a deep personal conviction of inadequacy; he fights well, and with conviction and duty, but it does not appeal to him of itself beyond being another form of perfection to strive after; he has an excellent sense of timing, judges people carefully, and is categorically incapable of violating a vow or really even denting it slightly; he is profoundly, devotedly devout, and wishes Jaci would stop needling him about it; he is a researcher, a scholar by nature, an explorer of the theoretical, one who wishes to expand the known and the possible; he is slightly vain, not about his looks, but about his clothing, for he has cultivated elegant tastes and poise as a defense against loss of status and because it is something that he could control; he does not cut his hair, for similar reasons.
His mother was assassinated when he was eight or so; his father hated him for complicated reasons; he lost rank and status and was a pariah among his kin and their employees for somewhere around a decade. It was his sense of justice that brought him and Jaci together, and he tempered her sense of vengeance and swung her around to at least something that orbits what passes in these parts for sanity. He loves her dearly, despite the fairly short time they've known each other, though he cannot readily say so, and is convinced that she only vowed to him to give him protection and some sort of kin-right; he perceives that he is in unwinnable rivalry with her long-dead lover.
When he killed his father, it was in profoundest mercy.
That's all him. Not a man, Mikel, starting from there, from him, the fellow in my head who Graydon called "terrifyingly civilized" when I was talking about him.
Writing Fred isn't all that different from writing Ethel. There's a person there on the other side of the words, and people transcend their merest adjectives.
(Brief context note: There is currently a certain amount of discussion on rasfc about whether or not women can convincingly write male characters. This irritates me.)
I hate, hate, hate with a passion the idea that there's something particularly difficult involved in writing a character who doesn't share one's traits. Any of one's traits; sex continues to be not a special case, though that's not the usual version of "sex" I mean when i say that.
I'm not writing women and I'm not writing men. I'm writing people, many of whom have sexes. Trying to wodge a character into a box defined by their sex -- or any of their other adjectives -- seems likely to cause them to break down as plausible people, because the questions come down to "does a man behave like that" or "does a Muslim behave like that" or "does someone with a degenerative bone disease behave like that", when the important question is, "Does Fred, the guy I'm writing about, behave like that".
Might Fred's maleness, his religion, his medical history have some impact on how he behaves? Of course. But that doesn't mean that I write Fred by calculating an intersection of the 'male' template with the 'Muslim' template and the 'denenerative bone disease' template; I write Fred by writing Fred, and the manifestations of those traits show up as they're relevant, rather than by crimping my thinking where they're not.
- But I am constantly amazed at how often adults ask me "How on earth did you *ever* make up such a strong female heroine (sic) as Cimorene?" My first reaction is always to blink and say "Make up? Don't you know any actual women?" (Children, interestingly, never, ever ask me this question. *They* want to know how on earth I ever managed to make up a six foot eleven inch insubstantial floating blue donkey with wings. I consider this a *much* more sensible question.)
--Patricia Wrede, posted to rasfc some time ago
I don't have a template for male characters. I don't know of any things that hold universally true about men to start with, even if I thought it wasn't a completely fucking stupid way to go about things. As I said on rasfc, I can't think of a single rule for building such a template to which I do not know multiple exceptions, including "has XY chromosomes". (*waves at
griffen*)I'm writing from the point of view of a male character, primarily, for The Devil's Due. I couldn't write it back when I finished The Devil's Dance a few years ago. Not because he's male. Because he speaks in a significantly different register than I do; because I strongly suspect that he's significantly more intelligent than I am, besides.
He's not that hard to write, now that I have the hang of his mode of speech. He's damaged, driven, generous by nature; he is compelled to master every art he takes up or the closest he can manage to do it, because he is a perfectionist driven by a deep personal conviction of inadequacy; he fights well, and with conviction and duty, but it does not appeal to him of itself beyond being another form of perfection to strive after; he has an excellent sense of timing, judges people carefully, and is categorically incapable of violating a vow or really even denting it slightly; he is profoundly, devotedly devout, and wishes Jaci would stop needling him about it; he is a researcher, a scholar by nature, an explorer of the theoretical, one who wishes to expand the known and the possible; he is slightly vain, not about his looks, but about his clothing, for he has cultivated elegant tastes and poise as a defense against loss of status and because it is something that he could control; he does not cut his hair, for similar reasons.
His mother was assassinated when he was eight or so; his father hated him for complicated reasons; he lost rank and status and was a pariah among his kin and their employees for somewhere around a decade. It was his sense of justice that brought him and Jaci together, and he tempered her sense of vengeance and swung her around to at least something that orbits what passes in these parts for sanity. He loves her dearly, despite the fairly short time they've known each other, though he cannot readily say so, and is convinced that she only vowed to him to give him protection and some sort of kin-right; he perceives that he is in unwinnable rivalry with her long-dead lover.
When he killed his father, it was in profoundest mercy.
That's all him. Not a man, Mikel, starting from there, from him, the fellow in my head who Graydon called "terrifyingly civilized" when I was talking about him.
Writing Fred isn't all that different from writing Ethel. There's a person there on the other side of the words, and people transcend their merest adjectives.
- A man once asked me--it is true that it was at the end of a very good dinner, and the compliment conveyed may have been due to that circumstance--how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a larged, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. 'Well,' said the man, 'I shouldn't have expected a woman [meaning me] to have been able to make it so convincing.' I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.
--Dorothy L. Sayers: from "Are Women Human?" 1938 (which Dorothy Heydt just posted to rasfc, enabling me to snag it for this and my quotes file, both)
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From: (Anonymous)
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> born Martian, I guess.)
*giggle* The truth is out at last.
- Aga