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Worldcon panel: Writing gender issues
Aug. 7th, 2010 04:30 pmBy this point in the conference, on the final day, I was suffering badly from convention brain syndrome; that's where everything starts to blur from the side-effects of too much time spent breathing stale air, and you stop being able to focus on much of anything. Ideas that formerly seemed exciting and motivating now fall to the ground with a dull thud. It's even worse for the writers who are serving as panelists, since most of them have stayed up far too late partying with their fans and schmoozing with agents and editors and the like. Some have been drinking just a wee bit too much and now resemble "the hair of the dog", or possibly the dog itself that bit them. As a result, this ended up being one of the last panels I attended, and one that I took the least useful information out of.
As in the "writing the other" panel discussions I've discussed previously, the main advice offered by the panelists came down to a simple nostrum that works well if you can manage it: always treat the characters as people, not as roles or stereotypes. Once you assign a character to an identity such as "heterosexual woman" or "gay man", it inevitably flavors what you subsequently do with the characters, and leads you to completely miss their essence. I think of this as the difference between the hack screenwriters who name a character "girl at bus stop" and the writers who name her (at least in their own minds) "Selma shortly after failing her grade 11 math test"; the former writers treat the character as nothing more than wallpaper. I haven't yet found time to read Elmore Leonard, but what I've seen of his films (and particularly of his often brilliant new TV show, Justified) suggests he's the latter kind of writer, who endows even minor characters with complex and often really interesting personalities.
As writers, we must ask ourselves the question of whether characters of various genders exist in our stories purely to reflect the diversity of our story world, or whether the interaction between gender and the cultural context is itself an important part of the plot. The former is a lazy, but at least good-intentioned, attempt to make our worlds seem more diverse and more reflective of the real world. At a minimum, we're at least trying to address historical imbalances and give the under-represented group some visibility. Though that's a good thing, we're not pushing any boundaries.
Much more interesting possibilities open up if we're willing to work a lot harder and actually empathize with those characters. For example, someone who is in a socially subordinate position typically finds it necessary to understand and successfully emulate those who are in positions with more social power. One panelist (whose name I forgot to record) suggested that this may be one reason why women do a better job of writing male characters than men do of writing female characters: they have more experience playing the game of life by male rules. That's a real possibility, but (restricting myself purely to the writer's task here) I suspect it's more a question of familiarity: there have traditionally been far more male characters in fiction to emulate, and many writers begin with emulation before they develop enough confidence to try out their own writing style. The same thing is obviously true for writing about gender: you start by writing what you know, and only later develop enough confidence to explore what you don't know. (Of course, then you actually have to do enough work to get the facts right. Not always easy if that gender identity isn't something you're familiar with.)
Gender is many things: it begins with biology, but is also a social construct and one's perception of one's own identity. Thinking through the role of gender in the context of a story's cultural setting and in the context of how it affects a character's self-image can lead to powerful insights into both plot and character, and thereby produce much stronger stories.
As in the "writing the other" panel discussions I've discussed previously, the main advice offered by the panelists came down to a simple nostrum that works well if you can manage it: always treat the characters as people, not as roles or stereotypes. Once you assign a character to an identity such as "heterosexual woman" or "gay man", it inevitably flavors what you subsequently do with the characters, and leads you to completely miss their essence. I think of this as the difference between the hack screenwriters who name a character "girl at bus stop" and the writers who name her (at least in their own minds) "Selma shortly after failing her grade 11 math test"; the former writers treat the character as nothing more than wallpaper. I haven't yet found time to read Elmore Leonard, but what I've seen of his films (and particularly of his often brilliant new TV show, Justified) suggests he's the latter kind of writer, who endows even minor characters with complex and often really interesting personalities.
As writers, we must ask ourselves the question of whether characters of various genders exist in our stories purely to reflect the diversity of our story world, or whether the interaction between gender and the cultural context is itself an important part of the plot. The former is a lazy, but at least good-intentioned, attempt to make our worlds seem more diverse and more reflective of the real world. At a minimum, we're at least trying to address historical imbalances and give the under-represented group some visibility. Though that's a good thing, we're not pushing any boundaries.
Much more interesting possibilities open up if we're willing to work a lot harder and actually empathize with those characters. For example, someone who is in a socially subordinate position typically finds it necessary to understand and successfully emulate those who are in positions with more social power. One panelist (whose name I forgot to record) suggested that this may be one reason why women do a better job of writing male characters than men do of writing female characters: they have more experience playing the game of life by male rules. That's a real possibility, but (restricting myself purely to the writer's task here) I suspect it's more a question of familiarity: there have traditionally been far more male characters in fiction to emulate, and many writers begin with emulation before they develop enough confidence to try out their own writing style. The same thing is obviously true for writing about gender: you start by writing what you know, and only later develop enough confidence to explore what you don't know. (Of course, then you actually have to do enough work to get the facts right. Not always easy if that gender identity isn't something you're familiar with.)
Gender is many things: it begins with biology, but is also a social construct and one's perception of one's own identity. Thinking through the role of gender in the context of a story's cultural setting and in the context of how it affects a character's self-image can lead to powerful insights into both plot and character, and thereby produce much stronger stories.