Writing Meme – Day 2

[erastes]

2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

I’m not really sure what that question means, to be honest. 

Does that mean per book? or overall in my books in total?  I have no idea how many characters I have in total, and I’m sure it will interest no-one if I go and add them up!!  I do try and have more than the main pairing in my books—and people have said that I create lovely secondary characters that they can really care about, and aren’t just cardboard cut-outs, people like Fleury from Standish (who will never admit that he’s a secondary anything, I’m afraid) and Mordecai from Frost Fair.

I prefer writing men.  I always have, even before I started on gay fiction -  and I don’t know why this is. I suppose there’s a dozen reasons that other people will find for this – that I’m a traitor to my sex, that I’m sexist, that I objectify men and all the usual clap-trap you hear around and about, but I don’t even think about it. Women appear in my books, and I hope that they aren’t cardboard cut-outs either, but other than being friends, or hopeful lovers, if I’m writing a romance, they can’t figure too strongly.  In Muffled Drum, my main protagonist is married, but being an aristocrat in 1860s Prussia, it’s hardly a love-match and although he’s fond of her in his way (e.g. they get on and don’t hate each other, enough to have had a couple of kids anyway) she’s not the main focus of his life. 

I do have a couple of books where there are no women at all – Frost Fair, if I remember rightly, certainly has no women. Tributary has satellite women, the owner of the hotel, several knitting old ladies, that kind of thing, but they aren’t the central core of the book.

I do like writing male characters. Being a pretty confident female, I like to play with characters who have difficulty expressing themselves without being shy – just brought up to be “manly” and “men don’t talk about that kind of thing.”  Because it’s huge fun to MAKE them talk about it…

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Comments

[norton-gale.livejournal.com]

I don't feel like a traitor to feminism by not having a female protagonist or narrator. My feeling is, I know what it's like to be a woman, so why not explore the male psyche instead? Men aren't criticized for having heroines, so I don't know why women writers are supposed to have central female characters. Sounds like a double standard to me.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Ain't that always the case, though? No-one's ever made a fuss about gay men writing about women, after all.