Monthly Archives: December 2011

It’s very important to me in my work that female characters are human, fully-developed, and have just as many quirks, flaws, and moments of strength as the male characters. I make sure, too, that my male characters have moments of vulnerability and–the good ones, anyway–do not subscribe to traditionally “masculinist” ideologies. That’s one way I mark a villain, in fact. If he’s sexist, he’s probably not someone I want the reader cheering for. I am not compelled to read or write work that fails to meet these basic criteria. I disagree with undermining characters’ objectives, success, and autonomy based on their gender, and in order to avoid appearance of such, I try very hard to make sure this doesn’t happen accidentally, even if the plot might dictate it.

Do I fail at times, even as an avowedly feminist writer? I’m sure I do. Patriarchy gets its mitts in society all over the place, so deeply entrenched that we don’t always notice it. But I think I’m getting better at portraying the kinds of women I want to read about, and I hope readers appreciate that I’m making the concerted effort, especially in genre fiction where (woman warrior tropes aside) female characters are still not always treated with the same level of respect as male characters.

For most of my long fiction, I spend months creating an outline before I ever put pen to paper on the novel itself. Usually for short fiction, however, I simply fly by the seat of my pants, letting inspiration take me where it will. The problem with this disparity is that of the outlined novels I’ve created this way, I’ve completed a grand total of zero of them. And yet the freeform stories I’ve just written on the fly? Over half of them have been published already, and the sheer word count of all my short prose alone would equal a novel or two.

So there’s the rub. Outlining might lead to more complex storytelling, more expansive and intricately designed worlds, built with attention to the minutest detail, but they will take you so long to do you might never finish them. One book series, I’ve been editing and re-editing for nine years now! It’ll get done, I’m confident, but I keep having to update the technological references and pop culture jokes every time I revisit it.

I’ve written my fair share of reimagined fairy tales. “Sparkling Teeth and Sacrifices” is essentially Snow White with vampires. In the pipeline, I have modern takes on Tristan and Iseult (“The Lovers,” soon to be appearing in Daily Love) and a Breton myth about a ghostly fisherman who kills people by a lighthouse (“Iannic-ann-ôd,” set for a January edition of Dark Fire Fiction). With a lot of my work, I try to invent my own mythology, but there’s something so deeply appealing about turning existing fables on their heads.

And I’m not the only writer with this fascination. Magazines and anthologies devoted to reworked fairy tales pop up all the time. Two of my favorite authors–Angela Carter and Joyce Carol Oates–both released entire collections of essentially feminist readings of monomyths. Anne Rice took it another step further with her Sleeping Beauty books.

So why do we do this? What’s the appeal? Is it a desire to drag your favorite childhood stories kicking and screaming into adulthood, to lay bare the essential weirdness of so many of them? To examine the source and remove the Disneyfication, leaving the gritty underbelly exposed?

I think it’s mostly about the appeal of speculative fiction overall. I write non-realistic work because I keep asking myself “what if…?” And sometimes that question comes when I’m feeling ornery and wondering just why Snow White was so pale or why the big bad wolf could talk. The whimsy of the fairy tale world? Or did vampires and werewolves lurk just at the corners of the imagination of the Brothers Grimm?