A fantastic article in the Atlantic looks at the challenge for a male author trying to write from a female persepective. I love the conclusion:

As literary critic Sarah Seltzer says, “writing across gender may be harder, require more research and humility. We may fail or get ‘called out’ for letting our biases show, or being ignorant. But the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.”

This is exactly why I was willing to commit to a female protagonist in WITCH, the first novel I’ve written intended for publication. I’ve fretted over Abigail, and I’ve worried that, as a male author, focusing upon her as my main character may discourage potential agents, editors and/or publishers.

I’ve decided I don’t care. Maybe it’d be easier to put out a manuscript that featured a lithe, blue-eyed, blond-haired lad as a protagonist, in a world where the girls are boyish and plucky until they decide they’re more interested in “lipstick and nylons.” But I’m ready to read something different. I’m ready for fantastic worlds that don’t crib most of their mythology from Tolkein. I’m ready for compelling characters transformed by the world around them.

Funny thing? The first draft of THIEF, the novel that follows WITCH, came together in less than half the time of WITCH. Maybe my worries are accurate. Maybe I’ve made my life more difficult by choosing Abigail and her story. But she’s made me grow as a writer. And maybe a person, too.

Twelve years after the release of Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan recognized he’d caught something special:

“The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.”

When I think about American music, I hear the Violent Femmes song with the lyric: “I like all kinds of music/but I like American music best.” When I try to define what I mean by the homey little phrase ‘American music’ I return to Dylan’s allusive, elusive description. I want Northern Arcadia to have a comparable musical tradition. Little problem. That ‘wild mercury sound’ was born from the blues, by which I mean…

“the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the “Deep South” of the United States around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.”

– source: Wikipedia article on the Blues.

There are people of all different skin colors in Northern Arcadia, for reasons I’ve touched on before. But there is no group of human beings who could be considered analagous to the African-American communities in the colonial Americas. When I first came to that conclusion, I stalled. I worried I’d never find a way to bring that ‘wild mercury sound’ to life in the taverns and camps and cobblestone streets of my novel new world.

This is the point when dhao bo, the toad people native to Northern Arcadia, stopped being a special effect (or an obscure reference) for me and became something rather more substantial in my imagination. Making music central to the toad people’s culture didn’t seem like a stretch. Toads and frogs and all their ilk warble on for hours, right? And of course (it flashed across my mind) the dhao bo tribes could croak messages back and forth network-style, allowing for some fairly sophisticated planning and military tactics. The dhao bo of Northern Arcadia would likely share an oral history, which would provide more information and a better context for dhao bo tribesmen during Pierre’s artifact hunt than Pierre himself.

And the music of Northern Arcadia no longer seemed destined to be completely funk-free.

Ursula K. LeGuin’s decades-old complaints about fantasy protagonists, articulated in a marvelous Slate article about the relationship between her books and the miniseries bearing the Earthsea name, ring true:

I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”).

Abigail Moore is a redhead, with pale skin. Every other major character (including the two principals in THIEF) has olive, tan or coffee-colored skin. Religion divides the colonists, greed corrupts and the desire for power still sets faction against faction.

But while people from many different ethnicities can be found in the New World, ‘race’ as a concept isn’t considered useful or germane. (I’m not sure it’s useful anywhere. But in my fictional world of Northern Arcadia, on this point, people happen to agree with me.)

Wired talks about the dearth of female roles in imaginative fiction. When I worked in a bookstore, decades ago, I was struck by the differences between the blonde haired, blue eyed male protagonists of most sci-fi/fantasy novels and the people reading the books.