I had an Adventure and Someone Else was the Protagonist

I've been wanting to blog for a while about POV choices in writing, and actually that IS what I'm going to discuss today. But before that --




Yes, there's an anthology call out right now for speculative stories about coffee! Find a little more info about it here, but it sounds fun. Now I just need to come up with a story by the deadline at the end of August, right? I'm thinking a few cups of caffeinated fluids derived from pulverized roasted tree-beans should provide ample inspiration.

For someone who drinks an almost worrisome amount of coffee every day, this is totally something I should send a submission to! If not because I always write speculative fiction about coffee (I haven't yet, ever), then because, on principle, I should write such fiction. It's like loving cats and never writing a story about cats! Oh, wait, I haven't done that either, never mind ...

Don't tell my cat or she'll be furious.

But I wanted to write about Point of View choices in fiction! If you've read any how-to-write books, you know that POV can be split infinitely--some authors say there are 2 options when writing fiction, while others list over 30. If you can distinguish 30 different sorts of POV, why bother? Just lump them back together, because I can't keep track of all that!

It's really not that complicated to me. Either you write a story in first-person (I/me) or in third-person (she/her). I wrote a story in second-person once (you/your), but this is a morbidly limited POV. Whenever you read second-person, it sounds like a letter someone wrote telling you what to do, and for me comes off contrived virtually always.

I've never sold that second-person story, in case you're wondering, and I always roll my eyes when I have to read this in someone else's fiction. Stop telling me what to do! I'm not in your story, I'm just a reader--just passing through!

But here's what's been bothering me: I read the guidelines to a magazine somewhere the other day that explicitly stated they prefer third-person stories to first-person. Why? I thought. Then: Everything I'm writing these days is in first-person! Is this true of other publications and they just don't tell people? Is this a pan-cultural subconscious reality that people feel, but don't always articulate, and which now means I'm not going to sell anything ever ever ever again?

Then I thought: Hey, how many stories do I read on average that are first vs. third-person? What are the percentages? And honestly, this isn't the sort of thing that I notice when I read. I just read a story and if I like it, I like it. It's funny to think that I only really notice that a story is third-person when it uses the male main character's last name in place of his first name (see my blog from Monday, August 27, 2012 for an honest-to-dog rant on that topic), and I only notice first-person-ness when you never declare whether your character is male or female.

So come on, what's the big difference? Is there one, even? You could argue that a first-person perspective is more immediate, direct, and intimate. Just as you could argue it's less interesting in the sense that, well, if this character is narrating this story, obviously they lived through their adventure and, presumably, turned out all right. Unless it's an HP Lovecraft tale--in which case, it's first person but the narrator is now a gibbering blob of jell-o. And yes, he used first person because of its directness and intimacy in capturing the descent into madness which virtually all of his characters partook in.

But first person has its limits. For example, you can only follow one character, get inside of one mind (yes, I've seen this rule broken, but generally speaking ... ). What if you need the reader to know things that the main character doesn't? Then you can't use first person. What if the main character is the sort whose mind you don't want to get inside? Well, then I'd argue that this isn't a very good main character you've got, but that's just me.

The advantages to third person don't seem all that great or significant--so why would someone prefer it? I guess first person can start to sound narcissistic (I led the charge, I declared my love, I wrote a blog), but only if you don't know how to approach your topic properly. And it can be one-sided (although the point of a story is generally to follow ONE character through something that happens, and hopefully out the other end). And it can start to sound like wish-fulfillment, as though the author is putting herself into fantastical and self-serving situations. But third person can be abused in just the same way, so that a character becomes a cipher for the author's ideal self, solving crimes single-handedly while saving the day all in time for dinner!

But if you write realistic characters, what's the difference between the POV you use? Either way your characters can't be one-sided perfect heroes who are only weakened by kryptonite and witty banter with girls. They need to think and fail and question and struggle and not refer to themselves by their own last names in internal monologue. They need to exist in a world aware that it's there around them and they are not the center--or they need to have this belief come crashing down on their heads. They need to do more than be worshipped and loved and agreed with. In short, they need to be people who are not only convincing but interesting and, above all, worth rooting for.

What's the big difference between making the story about "me" or "her" if the same adventure is had? I still don't know, but maybe someday I'll write a story both ways and see what I find out.

Women Continued ...

So in my last blog I complained about the two ways female main characters are presented in fantasy fiction that irritate me the most--in short, the big reasons I never used to like writing ladies as leads. Because, well, if I have to write women the same way these authors do, I honestly don't want to ...

The moment I hit the Publish button on that blog, I came up with a whole other host of "female attributes" I don't like. Some of these things are really subtle, or at least so deeply ingrained by our culture that it was hard for me to put my finger on just what I didn't like about this character or that one. But I guess the difference between what I wrote last week, and what came to me after publishing was that those things I discussed last week concern the ways female characters solve problems, while most of the problems I have with ladies in fantasy fiction is that they DON'T. Solve problems, that is.

After receiving a slew of kindly rejection letters (form and not), I picked up on a theme; my characters weren't proactive enough. Most were male characters, and that may be relevant to the discussion, actually. But the thrust of the non-form letters was that, sure, stuff was happening, but the main character was not the one moving the plot. Or, not nearly as much as he should be. I've worked to change that and at the same time paid especial care to the activeness of main characters in other people's stories. So that I can point and say "You're doing it wrong, ha!"

Or not. More like I'm seeking for some unwritten definition of what is proactive enough. Just recently I read (most of) a fantasy novel in which the main character was a young woman who unconvincingly became an assassin; tropes ensued, none of which are worth remembering. The issue for me was the author's huge struggle with making this character two irreconcilable things; she was naïve, awkward and uncouth, and yet had been hired to be a cold-blooded assassin. If you can buy that maybe you can read the whole book; I got halfway through and never managed to swallow that huge pill of unconvincingness. How did this utterly clueless and incapable character prove herself worthy of being an assassin? That was never discussed. Or, maybe it was in the second half?

More irritating in the case of this story, and many others I have read, the main character, being an ingénue, becomes the un-glorified sidekick of some cool hunky warrior guy who knows what he's doing. Women=naïve, clueless, foolish, emotional beings. Men=cool, suave, controlled, capable members of society. Only by learning from him and sleeping with him does she begin to grasp the world, or people, or herself.

Gag reflexes: engage!

So let's get back to the topic at hand: proactive-ness and problem solving. How did this girl solve her problems and push the story forward? Why, just as any girl would in real life--she bumbled around stupidly, demanded things awkwardly, and, once she'd got the hang of human interaction, did her best to emotionally manipulate her hunky lead whenever they couldn't agree. She didn't have a real purpose behind this emotional tide, most of the time. 

Although, she didn't get everything she wanted, either. I mean, guys are bigger, cooler, and can get shoutier. And when they're hunky super-warriors, they know better than you and can boss you around and leave you behind while they go out to save the day. Because even though he'll teach you martial arts and sleep with you, and maybe sometimes let you emotionally manipulate him, when it comes to saving the day he'll do that. You wait in the cave.

To the author's credit, I must say she didn't seem very convinced by her own female lead. She was writing a trope character and seemed painfully aware of it, which made the character even more unconvincing. Really, this character is a trope that has existed for so long that it's a wonder it's still around!

This book is just one example, and I'm sure you could come up with your own without much thinking. Really, such asinine romances are everywhere, in which a girl discovers herself and the meaning of her existence, etc., in a hunky guy; throughout she's generally powerless except for her ability to cry and guilt the guy into doing what she wants while he protects her, blah, blah. I find such pathetic characters to be a bigger and more pervasive "fantasy" than the idea that magic or dragons might exist. People don't really believe in dragons, but they do believe women are largely emotional beings, and men naturally more capable in all ways that count. Whatever those are.

So perhaps you can see why I'm thinking a lot about an epic fantasy with a female lead, and why this would be just as difficult as it would be important? Because men in the real world can be whiny and manipulative and clueless, and women can be capable and cool and strong. OUTSIDE of any issues of sexuality, I mean.

Let me return to the heart of the issue, then. My characters who weren't proactive enough were all male. If they'd been women, would this have been an issue? Maybe subliminally, but I doubt to such a degree. In fiction we expect male characters to be the ones who get in fights and kill bad guys and save the day. And while proactive female characters are cherished too, their way of "progressing the story", I've noticed, is often subtler, smaller. More realistic, maybe? Well, that all depends on what you think women are capable of, I guess.

I don't want to beat a dead horse here so let me close with one last observation--something I've observed in my own fiction as well as in others'. The general rule seems to be (subconsciously) that stories hinging more on emotion--especially if it's despondency, misery, depression, loss of everything you loved--use women as leads more often, while action-based stories use male leads. Again, because women are more emotional and men more active? It gets tiresome to read so many depressing stories where women are victimized, sad stuff happens, sadder stuff ensues, and maybe if you're lucky there's a bittersweet ending.

We need to stop using woman as a byword for "victim" in fiction!

I mean, come on, who doesn't want to break that rule?

Inventing Real Women

Recently, I've been reflecting on a post I wrote awhile back about my tendency to write main characters who are male. Through no intent of my own, my three publications so far have had female main characters; two for anthologies that were specifically looking for this. Does this mean that I write female characters better, or that having a blatantly girly name like Marissa immediately discredits my male characters in editors' subconscious, or is it random? Maybe it has to do with the different sorts of subject matter covered with male vs. female main characters--and yet, those three publications don't have a lot in common in this sense ...

But looking at my latest round of submissions has evidenced a changing trend, it seems. Without thinking about it, I managed to split the stories evenly, half male and half female main characters. So, I tallied up all my marketable stories and found that the shorter ones (say, 0-5000 words) divide evenly, while most of the longer (and older) ones (5000 all the way up to 20,000) have mostly male leads. The difference? Longer stories are, for me at least, more often epic and action-oriented in tone. Which is sort of obvious, as you can't get too epic in under 5000 words.

So this means two things. 1) I have been writing a lot more stories under 5000 words lately, and a lot more with female leads, and 2) I have concurrently moved away from epic action tales. The first is good, while the second is maybe not so good. Something in my subconscious is telling me that female main characters don't belong in epic action tales. They can lead stories, just not big adventurous ones. The rest of me, now aware, disputes this.

I mean, it hardly sounds fair!

Theoretically there could be all sorts of issues with having a female main character who is, say, a swordswoman or assassin or something. Foremost being the believability factor. Is it logical to put a woman into the role of sword wielding super-barbarian? Or whatever? If the answer is yes, which it certainly should be, can you accept the fact that a cast-iron bikini is not logical battle armor? Nope, this epic women thing isn't as simple as it so often sounds.

The biggest problems I've had with female leads in fantasy fiction fall in two categories (looks like today is the day of twos!). Firstly, if you accept the widely held belief that a main character must be proactive to move the plot, then these females do so by being amazingly annoying, noisy, pushy, whiny, demanding, rude, and snotty, and these are accepted as typical female traits. Often these are younger main characters who propel the story by either being obnoxious or pretending they are, or by opening doors they shouldn't, touching things they shouldn't, breaking things they shouldn't, crying/fainting/etc. to get their way and move the plot ... in general being or pretending to be immature as though this is how young women should/do behave and solve problems. Or even save the day.

*Oh, and don't ask how many such stories I've read--it probably hasn't been all that many, really. You just have to read one or two like this to be pretty irritated and repulsed. But I promise you it's been more than one or two. If I didn't like snotty little girls when I was in grade school and having to coexist with them, why oh why would I want to read about them as though these are virtues? I guess because little boys get all the good qualities?

The second way in which female fantasy characters are presented is, obviously, as over-sexualized iron-bikini-wearing super-chicks. Which is no more complimentary than the snotty-baby image. This image lets us know that a woman can do anything, including slaying gods and banishing demons, as long as she is amazingly sexy and mostly naked. The greatest threat to super-babe in these instances doesn't come from the possibility of death/pain/maiming which she might suffer at the hands of enemies, but rather that her oh-so-sexy self may be subjected to abuses of a different sort. As though I really want to read about this, either, and have random authors informing me that even in made-up worlds women (even strong and capable ones) are concurrently viewed as sexual and inferior objects. Why can't this just NOT happen once in a while?

Honestly, why not? This question has bugged me since going through my own stories. Why can't there be female characters who solve problems and lead epic stories like REAL women? And, moreover, what would this look like? I'm still thinking about it and certainly I don't have all the answers, but I can tell you that, at least, when I write this theoretical epic story, there will be no whining or breaking of things, and also full suits of armor.

Awesomeness--Now in Bottled Form!

So I didn't get around to blogging yesterday, though I wanted to. That's because I was trying to do MORE IMPORTANT THINGS, such as ACTUALLY WRITING. Yes, real fiction writing is more important, sorry. Whatever secret formula I employed yesterday, it worked, as I finished the short story I was working on then plowed straight through another from beginning to end in 3 hours! Actually, that deserves a few more exclamation points.

!!!!!!

There we go. Yeah, it was surprising to conceive, plot, and write a story out all in one sitting--can't remember the last time I did, if I EVER have. If I could bottle and sell that, guess who'd be first in line to buy it? The story I finished took me about 7 days for 4500 words, which isn't bad. A few days and I'll send it out for a call at the end of the month. Yay!

The one I started and finished came out to roughly 2000 words, which was my estimate when I started. I never estimate properly--for example, 2000 is how long I thought the 4500-word one would finish up. Strange how (mostly) everything worked out as I intended it to....

I decided to do this 2000-word story on a lark--there was a call for dark versions of Grimms' Fairy Tales so I did a little research and an idea hit me. And I wrote it.

Yes, I have said before that I dislike reworked fairy tales. On a related note, hubby and I tried to watch Oz the Great and Powerful or whatever it was called and JUST COULDN'T. I wanted to barf the whole time, and rolled my eyes whenever he wasn't looking. I don't think we made it halfway through... Never even liked the Wizard of Oz; don't think I've ever watched it all the way either because, honestly, do I have to? If you know the plot, as I suspect you do, it's just painful to watch the bad makeup and corny acting and heavy-handed moralizing and offensive use of people with dwarfism. Nothing about that movie was ever "magical" to me. In the case of the new film, corny acting and bad costumes and flying monkeys in bellhop uniforms aren't an improvement.

I guess for me the world of Oz was just too juvenile or unbelievable or flat-out unpleasant to want to visit. Yeah, even as a kid. I shudder at the thought of skipping down a yellow brick road and always wished I could cut that lion's nasty mane of Goldilocks curls.

Okay, I'm over it. Getting off topic here. Anyway, so I'm not crazy about fairy tale retakes, and yet I did one of my own. Does this make me a hypocrite? No. Well, not entirely. Here's the difference: everyone has read Cinderella or Red Riding Hood or the more popular fairy tales. The ones we know best largely involve female protagonists who get into situations with thinly-veiled sexual undertones (a "slumber" that can only be broken by "true love's kiss", being cornered by a "wolf", the consequences of pricking your "finger" on a "spindle", eating a poisoned--read "forbidden"--fruit). Naturally none of these ladies can save themselves. Naturally, a lot of rehashes replay these stories with a feminist bent, so that they do.

It's gotten to the point that seemingly every fantasy writer in the world has tried their hand at this, if only to be able to say they did. Or to try and do it better than the last person? Please. Cinderella is Cinderella. Your version is not going to be more memorable than the one that's been pounded into our brains since toddlerhood. And if you're going to retell a story you can only change so much of it, meaning that ultimately you end up following the same old plot line with a few alterations. This is just the inevitability of retelling a well-known story--in order to keep it identifiable, you can't change everything. In order to make it new, you DO have to change SOMETHING.

How to write a retelling of a fairy tale without initiating the *yawn, Snow White again?* reaction? Here's my solution: don't do Snow White. Or any of the popular tales. I certainly can't add anything worthwhile to the loooong list of Snow White/Cinderella/Red Riding Hood retellings. In no small part because I have no passion for these stories. Although I suspect the passion has been flogged out of the stories themselves, not out of me.

So I took one of the more obscure stories because this way no one has preconceptions about it. There aren't 5000 other versions to compare it to. Bwahaha.

This seems like a good time to mention that a lot of original fairy tales do present female protagonists who not only take care of themselves, but their families, while saving the day. And there are so many other undercurrents of meaning in these stories that can be interesting and useful to a fiction writer. I picked the story that spoke to me best--my interests, my writerly abilities--and that's probably how I banged the whole thing out in a matter of hours. Because--haha--I already had a basic shape, just had to change things up a bit and write them down.

This call will be coming due at the end of July, so I have some time to sit on it and fix it up. I could've put off writing until all my submissions for June are sent out but, actually, sometimes you have to just write what's at the forefront of your mind, get it down on paper (digital paper for me) and get done. So I did.

And, as you can maybe see, I'm rather overly proud of myself for it, too.

All Avenues Exhausted, Time to Climb on the Roof

Okay, so now I have tried everything, be it my desk in my cohabited room, the couch in the TV room, the dining table where no one eats, the table on the back porch. Even the badly-lit unused bedroom has fallen prey to my attempts to find a place where I can SIT and WRITE and not be DISTRACTED.

Firstly, I thought no one would be able to find me there for, oh, the whole day when really it took 2 hours before my hubby came in looking as though he thought I might've run off to join the circus. Which hadn't happened ... although ... then again, it's not too much different, is it?

Regardless, 2 hours isn't enough time for me to get much done in. Not that the badly-lit room full of other people's junk was the most conducive environment, but I just needed to find somewhere quiet so I could focus on a submission that's due in a few days. I swear, next time they can't find me it'll be because I'm in the crawlspace under the house. That should work out pretty well, right? Well, if there's enough space to open my laptop.

Really what I need is a desk and a computer and a cubby hole with nothing else. Nothing on the walls, no stuff to distract me. Well, maybe snacks and music, but those are necessary. I've noticed I can work quite well at a walled desk at the library--if there's not someone on a cell phone next to me. And people who don't write don't understand how far off track a single small distraction can get me. Even if you're not trying to distract me by scrambling eggs in the room where I'm trying to write, sorry, but you succeeded anyhow. That's how it is.

Now that we're in summer and my last round of submissions has returned to me unaccepted, I have to get to work on some more. Yeah! Besides I have a half ton of things I need to get around to, including: plugging into a tree, listening to psychic double-speak, revisiting Pygmalion, finding the fingerprints of ghosts, using time travel to create a masterpiece, becoming a mask, falling in love under lunar trees, tracing the cause and effect of chaos, digging where archaeologists don't want you to--oh, or at least writing about them. What's more, going through my list of stories to submit, and then scanning the documents I have filed as stories, there's a disappointingly large amount of them unfinished, for various reasons (most of which lead back into the territory of being distracted constantly while working, to the point that I moved on to something else I thought I could finish). I could probably complete most of them, and I should so they can make the rounds, too.

I will admit I have a story on file that I started in 2011, I do believe, and though I like it a lot, I still haven't figured out how to end it. Mysteries of life.

But hey, here's hoping that can happen before Fall Term starts!

Editing in Evidence

The term is almost over and summer's almost here! If that doesn't lift the spirits, I don't know what will!

Unfortunately, however, summer is only three months of awesome--three months which I intend to overfill with personal obligations. I will be writing a paper, and working (hopefully more) and trying to churn out some fiction, which I can then fold into amusing origami shapes and send to potential publishers ....

Meanwhile, since it's been so long since I've done any fiction writing, I think I'm going to brush up on my basics again. Besides wanting to watch/read art related stuff, I want to pick up the ever-handy Strunk and White's Elements of Style, and maybe also Browne and King's Self-Editing Your Fiction. Strunk and White is THE guide to writing, whether you're a reporter, biographer, student, or fiction writer. I've read it a handful of times, and it's always helpful to go back to, just to get a reminder of things that may have fallen to the wayside. That said, it's a very general guide, and doesn't give a lot of advice that's immediately useful for fiction. Although the co-author, E. B. White, was the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web, so he knew what he was doing writing this little book.

Browne and King's is more useful if you want actual blow-by-blow assistance with fiction-writing issues. They do a good job of everything from sentence structure to giving tips on how to effectively guide a story. These authors, both fiction editors by profession, know what publishers will and won't accept, and how you can shape your story accordingly.

Maybe I'll also hunt up a couple other editing books, who knows? It's always good to get a new perspective. I've read dozens of such books in my life, and can also recommend Ursula K Le Guin's Steering the Craft, or Stephen King's On Writing (which is half biography but sneakily makes its point about compelling writing in this aspect too...).

For the most part if you read books on editing they'll give you the same dozen or so tips. Maybe spoken in a slightly different way, but this just means that the same issues crop up for authors, editors, and publishers when it comes to What's Good. That said, I wonder if this changes? I mean, Strunk and White is from, like, the '20s or '30s, and Browne and King was published in the (gasp!) '90s. Are they still relevant? Well, judging from the fact that EVERYONE still recommends that you read Strunk and White at least once in your life ... I guess that one is.

On the other hand, I've read editing books by people who don't have the experience, or who you've never heard of, and though they'll give you the same pointers on adjectives and POV, it doesn't feel quite the same coming from some random person who may/may not have the credentials to back it up. It makes me wonder what an Idiot's Guide to Fiction Writing might be like. Hmm, maybe I'll see if the library has a copy of that...

Hey, how did this post turn into an editing advice corner? I think it has to do with the fact that I need to get down to some editing of my own pretty soon. But hey, maybe this could be useful to someone else, too!

Playing with Fire!!!

Wahoo! I have survived writing 2 (count em, 2!!) papers! It's lovely and exciting and ...

Oh yeah! Playing with Fire is out!!! I've been meaning to do my happy dance for a couple days now ... anyway, check it out right here. Oh, and there's a final version of the cover--a little different than I posted earlier. Looks cool!



I think I said this before, but this is one of the first SF stories I've ever written, and the first to get published. And, now I'm batting 3 for 3 in stories sold-to-female protagonists. Interesting. I wonder; if I went by a male pen name, would this still be true? Hmmmm.... We shall see.

Anyway, the anthology looks really good (and affordable--hey!) so take a look! As far as authors are concerned, they pretty much only care for you to read the story and worship it, but I suspect that the lovely people over at Third Flatiron Press would appreciate it if you bought a copy, to make writers like me worth the price they paid. :)

Oh, no, I'm not cheap. You can't buy me with just any old kind of granola ...!

I also feel really smart because I just realized that Third Flatiron Press is named after a mountain called Third Flatiron. Which is a part of their logo. And here I thought it was just a pretty picture ... sigh ....

Ah, well. Back I go to the paper-writing ....