Comments on: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman who Looks an Awful Lot Like James Joyce

By: M. Caliban

M. Caliban — Mon, 30 May 2011 04:34:07 +0000

As a child and teenager, I was an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy adventures. It was always the guys slaying orcs, guys discovering the mystic orb of Thinga’mawits, guys flying spaceships and dueling with lightsabers. It frustrated me and when I write speculative fiction, I make sure the ladies do the awesome, fun stuff that I wanted to read about.

By: Suzi McGowen

Suzi McGowen — Mon, 23 May 2011 19:43:51 +0000

The “monster” in my book was originally going to be male. I change him to her about half way through and made it a better book. She has both better (more understandable) motivation for being a monster, and I think the “dark mother” archetype is scarier.

Interestingly, in my book, lots of people think she is a he, because she has killed millions of people (and only men do that, right?).

By: josin

josin — Sat, 21 May 2011 04:17:45 +0000

I was blessed with an English teacher who believed that, in order to appreciate the material presented, students needed to get over their assumptions. One of the ways she did that was to not assign the girl parts to girls and the boy parts to boys as written.

When reading in class, she would assign both the lead parts to girls or boys, not one of each, and told us to make people forget we weren’t the right gender for the part. It was the words that mattered.

I understand it better now, but the fact that she was able to do that, without interference from the district or parents was highly unusual, but advantageous to those of us who had the privilege of calling her our teacher.

Yes, it was strange reading Romeo opposite another girl, but it made the material stick, and after the first, few awkward moments, the words became the important part and the players ceased to matter.

By: Ciara

Ciara — Sat, 21 May 2011 00:14:15 +0000

Funny I had a few short years as a theatre director, before I realised that actors drive me doolally, and I felt the same frustrations. The vast majority of plays are written for male actors which is crazy because in my experience there were always 5 times as many female auditioning for any part.

I find I do primarily write female characters and have to work to put male characters into my work. In fact I was thinking about this problem just today and wondering if I could swap some of my women for a men because my wip is starting to look like an alternate female only universe. Whoops.

By: Joelle

Joelle — Fri, 20 May 2011 23:09:15 +0000

I started out as an actress and decided to focus on comedy for the exact reasons you cite. Boring roles. Also, as a writer of comedy, I was able to write great roles for myself.

There are something like 11 male acting roles for every 1 female acting role (old statistics, old memory, but something like that) in theatre.

As a writer, I decided early on to always write strong female roles. It doesn’t mean my books might not have a silly or weak girl, but like most people, she also has inner strengths and smarts. I also have assigned roles to women that readers might expect to be men. And I try to make my male characters more well-rounded too. If they’re in a position of authority, I want readers to believe they’re the kind of person who earned it (or didn’t, but got it for other reasons).

However, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, I HAD TO TRAIN MYSELF TO DO THIS. Like so many people, I often find when writing that I have assigned a role of authority to a male – like principals, doctors, and even teachers (which is ironic when you consider how many more female teachers there are than male). Luckily, there are many, many rounds of rewrites and edits that allow us to go back and fix these things.

Thanks for bringing this up!