The spring isn’t here yet, not in my country anyway, but we have had such a
lousy winter that I decided to start the spring clean early. I have
revamped my blog. It was due sooner or later, but now it serves the purpose of countering
the mud and rain too.
The blog has a new theme, for one; a beautiful, wintry landscape, maybe
from Japan. I liked the picture, but if I had known how difficult it would be
to find a font colour for the title and description lines that actually shows, I would have
reconsidered. As it is, I hope the text is legible.
A bigger change is the name of the blog. It has been called Writer’s
Block from the beginning, which I used to find amusing, but have since grown
bored with. So now the name is Susanna Writes. I’m not entirely happy with
that either, but I thought Susanna Shore Author would be too stiff. The name
change follows the similar move I made on my reading blog last week. It’s now
called Susanna Reads. I’m consistent, if nothing else.
I still have one great change ahead of me. I changed the administrator
from one e-mail account to another, both mine, so that I’d be able to link this
blog with my Google+ profile. I want to delete the original administrator, but
I fear that it would delete all the posts too.
Anticipating the change, I have re-uploaded
all the pictures, because they definitely will disappear otherwise. Going
through all the old posts has made me see that the loss wouldn’t be unbearable if
the posts disappeared, but I’d rather they didn’t. However, if the blog
suddenly ceases to exist, you’ll know what has happened.
Part of being an independent author is trying to figure out how to best
sell books. Since I’m not a marketing genius, I tend to go with what others
have already proven effective. It may work – or not. It’s all about
experimenting.
My latest experiment is to bundle in one volume the first books of the
Two-Natured London series. I now have three books in the series out so it made
sense to put the first two together and charge a little less for it than what the
two would cost separately. Many indie authors have spoken favourably about that
tactic, and as a reader and consumer, I like the chance to save a few cents
when I can.
I have seen larger bundles on sale too, but I didn’t want to do that. It
would have made too large a file for one, and the price would have been higher
than I suspect an average reader is willing to pay. That, or I would have had
to price it much lower than I wanted to. I priced the bundle at $4.99, which I
think is reasonable. The two separately cost a dollar more.
Somewhat unimaginatively, I called the new edition Two-Natured London,
Bundle One. I didn’t want to give my old readers an impression I had published
a new book. The cover, too, is a combination of the original covers. The name
gives a promise of more bundles to come as well, and there will be, once I have
more books in the series out. I’m currently working on the fourth book, so that
will happen eventually.
Until then, enjoy the series so far. You can find the new bundle here (US) and here (UK).
“Ours is a culture that prefers to make our identities static and
confine them to categories, often diametrically opposed to one another” (Maria Popova)
Do you struggle to make your characters believable when they aren’t your
own gender, or are otherwise different than you? Many of us do. It’s difficult
enough to understand one’s own self well enough, let alone the other, which is
why we so often resort to stereotypes. In a couple of characteristics, we can
draw characters that are easily recognisable to all.
Not only are stereotypical characters easier to write, they tend to be well
received by the readers too. This is especially true with the ‘heroes’ of genre
literature. Readers associate themselves with characters that meet their
ideals. Most often these include “the values associated with youth and with
masculinity … anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior,”
as Susan Sontag has noted. Heroes, whoever they might be, often fit this ideal.
Last week, in his column for the Guardian, Damien Walter called for
less immature fantasy heroes. The comment section shows clearly how well this
was received, which is to say, not well at all. For many, the stereotypical superhero
is a character to look up to, and they make their point clear. But, as Mr
Walter notes, idolising the superheroes has led “to the arrested development of
many men today,” which would make stereotypes not only limiting for authors,
but harmful for readers too.
According to Mr Walter, “there is a desperate need for stories that tackle
the hard truths of (white) male identity,” and he sees this as a way to writing
more complex male characters. But human beings are complex in ways beyond their
gender or race. We constantly change too. “Identity is something that you are
constantly earning. It is a process that you must be active in,” as Josh Whedonpoints out.
If you set out to create your characters according to some idea of what
they should be, a man or a woman, old or young, black or white, you are
limiting yourself from the start. From Susan Sontag:
“A lot of our ideas about what we can do at different ages and what age
means are so arbitrary — as arbitrary as sexual stereotypes. I think that the
young-old polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two
leading stereotypes that imprison people.”
And as much as they “imprison us”, they imprison our characters.
Freeing our characters from the stereotypes isn’t easy. As we create
them in our minds we picture them as men and women, old or young, and plan
their courses accordingly. But it doesn’t have to go like that.
I wrote a short story recently where I deliberately tried not to give a fixed gender or race for my main character. I gave my character a
name that could belong to a man or a woman both, and I didn’t describe the character at all. Pretty early on the character turned out to be a woman,
though, partly because there isn’t a gender neutral pronoun in English for the first
person singular. But for a long time I thought she could be black just as well
as white. In the end, I decided that she would be white, mostly because
that’s what I’m more familiar with.
I don’t hold my experiment a failure just because I went with the
obvious and gave my character a recognisable gender and race. It was interesting
to write a character that could have been anything. That she turned out to be a
rather stereotypical representative of her gender works within the story too. I
guess that is the excuse we all use.
As an exercise, I warmly recommend that you try to write a character
that isn’t obviously a man or a woman. You can free your mind to writing a character that
doesn’t follow any predestined behavioural paths, as you have to constantly
think whether you’re giving the gender of the character away. Even if you
eventually settle for a gender, you will have created a more complex person,
not merely a character. And that can lead to anything.
