Hi everyone! One of the things I’m trying to be careful of as a guy is how I write female characters. Am I making her weak and supine? Am I making her a superhuman “Mary Sue?” Am I writing within a trope that is now considered unacceptable, or am I going to turn off my audience if I try something new? How can I “get under the skin” of a female character without falling into stereotypes?
I asked for help from my writing guru Stefen, and he strongly recommended Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jnr, aka Alice Sheldon. For those who might not have heard of her, Sheldon wrote Sci-Fi under the pen name James Tiptree Jnr in the 1960s and 1970s, both to protect her academic career and to achieve fame in the male-dominated publishing industry. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is a collection of Sheldon’s most famous short stories.
If I gave a review of each story, I think I’d be typing all night, so here’s a 30 second rundown – Sheldon has two amazing strengths. The first is the ability to depict a rounded character, complete with a lifetime of emotional drives, in nothing more than a paragraph or two. Her other greatest strength is creating a narrative not just from the threads of each story, but from the spaces and connections between these threads that only the reader can see. The best example of this was one of my favorites, Your Faces, O my sisters! Your faces filled with Light! One part of the story is told in first person, with an optimistic young woman working as a courier in a post-apocalyptic world. Intertwined with this are the observations of everyday people in the modern world, wondering why this strange young homeless woman keeps babbling nonsense as she runs past them. Another great example is the different letters from different characters making up the story of The Screwfly Solution.
A story that deserves special mention is one of Sheldon’s most famous stories, The Women Men Don’t See. To be fair, it took me a couple of read throughs to really get this. The story is exactly what the title described: a male main character who goes through his plot, aware but unable to understand the two woman he is travelling with, even after the otherworldy plot twist at the end. The tension doesn’t arise from his reaction to the strange events – the tension arises from the fact that he is watching something monumental take place but can only understand the barest edge of it.
Let’s not get too fanboy about this though. A Momentary Taste of Being could have been culled down to half its length and still been a great story. Love is the Plan is Death was descriptive, impactful, emotional… and just kinda weird.
As for female characters? I’m still unpacking a lot from reading this, but I’m hoping I’ve picked something up about how depicting women with emotion, ambition and drive.
For anyone who loves Sci-Fi or anyone who wants to improve their writing, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is an absolute must-have.
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