Back of the Envelope

I may be embarrassing her by doing this, but my girlfriend, Kristin, has just started a blog. Like me, she's a writer, typically science fiction and fantasy. Don't expect her to put any of her work online--she's way too serious about publishing--but check out her credits.

Labels: blogging

A while ago, I was listening to the 3/16/2009 podcast of Writing Excuses, a writing podcast featuring Howard Taylor of Schlock Mercenary, Brandon Sanderson, who's writing the last few novels of the Wheel of Time, and horror writer Dan Wells. The podcast was on clichés, and the subject came up of how to keep characters of a different gender than the writer from being clichéd. When I first started writing seriously, I was very reluctant to write a scene from a female POV. I just didn't think I knew how to pull it off. This held until I was writing Fire, and I reached the third chapter and realized that it really had to be told from the point of view of Lucia, who is not only female, she's a teenage girl--fourteen at the time of that chapter. I agonized over it a bit, but ultimately bit the bullet and started writing. It was hardly perfect in the first draft (or the second or third, for that matter), but when my writing group finally got around to reading it, they thought I had done a pretty good job of telling the story from a teenage girl's perspective.

So what's the secret? Or is there a secret? Well, here are the things that helped me:

1. I have two younger sisters. Okay, this is one of those things you can't really emulate--you either have siblings of the opposite sex or you don't. It was quite a boon for me, as I was an eyewitness to two girls growing up. That one was a year and a half younger than me, and thus roughly in my age group, and the other was seven years younger, so I could take more of an outsider's view, was also helpful. Even if you don't have sisters (or brothers, if you're a woman), you can still learn directly from members of the opposite sex. Friends, girlfriends, wives, and daughters can all help you to learn more, if you're willing to listen to them. That said, I'm not sure anything else is quite as helpful in understanding the opposite sex as growing up with them.


2. I've read books by women with a female POV. That is, after all, what I'm trying to capture, a POV that seems natural. Stories in my own genre are best, but other genres can be helpful as well. It might help if I had more patience for Romance or Chick Lit, but I do have some limits.


3. I have women in my writing group. In fact, I've pretty much always had more women than men in my writing group. Thus I have people to tell me what doesn't work, and what doesn't seem natural. If you don't have a writing group, or if by some quirk of fate they're all your gender, you can still have female friends read your story, and tell you what works and what doesn't. Understand, though, that it's rare to get really good criticism if the reader is not a serious writer.


4. I make sure there's a person behind the stereotype. I'll admit, I'm not above using stereotypes. I wrote Lucia as a stereotypical teenage girl, before I brought her face to face with real tragedy to see how she'd deal with it (hint: not shoe shopping). I've done the flighty girl and the schoolmarm, and gave one of them visions and made the other rescue her son from evil wizards. Stereotypes are useful when conceptualizing characters, but mostly what they tell you is how other people perceive them. What's really going on inside of them, how they respond to crises--the two things that you need to describe whenever you write a story from their POV--never really fit the stereotype. You can use stereotypes, but make sure you dig deeper.


5. I usually don't try too hard. I'll admit, I tried really hard to get Lucia's early POVs right. It may be that teenage girls are a special case, though. Or I just lacked confidence. I haven't tried as hard with my other female POVs. Women are, after all, people: I'm not trying to write about an alien race. There are differences, but I think where a lot of writers get it wrong is dwelling on those differences, rather than focusing on the person and on the story. Generally, if you can get the motivations right (where a lot of those differences do come up), the rest will flow naturally from that.

So that's what helps me write a female POV. How about you? What helps you write from the perspective of the opposite gender?

Labels: Writing

The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the one hundred and ninth. It will be hosted here, at Back of the Envelope, and going up on Monday, May 3rd. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is your opportunity. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, May 1st. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

Labels: Storyblogging Details