On Strong Female Characters

I'm not going to lie to you. Many of us who write strong female characters have begun to wince when we're asked to talk about them at panels or during an interview. It's not because being a strong female is a trend that has passed, but because it was never a trend in the first place.

Women were strong before Katniss picked up a bow or Tris jumped off a train. Read The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder - a true story - and you'll see a young girl braiding sheaves of straw together until her hands bleed so that her family has something to burn in their stove to ward off the bitter temperatures. Read that book as an adult and you'll understand that the family is dying, slowly starving to death while malnutrition and ennui sets in.

I dabble in genealogy as a hobby, and have traced my German line back to the 1500s. There I found a woman who gave birth to 15 children - and outlived all but two of them. I ran the dates, and in one week she lost two adolescent daughters (due to an illness in the home, I assume), gave birth a few days later, then lost the infant the next week.

She kept going.

There were seven other children still at home that needed care. She went on to raise them, and deliver more healthy children that grew into adulthood. She lived to be nearly 100 - certainly an accomplishment in the 1500's - and buried all but two of the children she gave birth to.

I bring up this ancestor from 500 years ago when I'm asked about writing strong female characters. This mother of fifteen didn't know about YA literature - in fact, she probably couldn't read - but I'm pretty sure she would have laughed at the idea of strong women being a trend.

Women were strong then.
Women are strong now.
Women will continue to be strong.

Us Vs. Them: It's Not A Question of Gender

I've been asked more than once if I'm a man-hater.

The answer is no, I'm a rapist-hater.

When I was a kid I grew up surrounded by male cousins, a predominance of males my age in my church, and most of my close friends were males. I distinctly remember going to a birthday party in kindergarten where I was the only girl, insisting on being the blue Transformer, and generally having a blast.

Not much changed as I grew older. Yes, things changed. We became aware that we were fundamentally different from one another. There were attractions as we matured, some weird confusion from time to time, misunderstandings and miscues... all the things that make life interesting.

But at no point did I ever hate men.

And I still don't.

Some of my closest friends are male (weirdly all their names start with J), and the election cycle  brought up  a lot of conversational fodder, as you can imagine. I don't necessarily agree with them - or they with me - all the time, on every topic. But we can converse, and I've said things to them that brought women's issues into a different perspective, and they've told me things that made me understand that men also have unique fears in social situations.

So often - and especially in the current climate - we find it easier to draw a line that separates us from them. We like the simplicity of assessing a person based on their gender or race, but real life - and real humans - are much more complicated than that.

I prefer to think in terms of decency, which is a choice we all have to make every day. No matter what we've done in our past, who we voted for, or whether or not we liked The Phantom Menace, we can choose to be decent today.

So no, I'm not a man-hater.

I'm a hate-hater.

Portrait Of The Author At Seven

Last week I told you about an experience I had as a budding author in junior high, and how my life came full circle in November as I returned to Atlanta to participate in the NCTE conference - the same organization that gave me one of my first writing awards at the age of fourteen. This week, fellow author and Edgar-nominee Matthew Baker (IF YOU FIND THIS) is hosting my earliest piece of writing to achieve recognition.

My 2nd grade teacher was one of my favorites - in fact, she's still substituting at the school and spotted a typo in IN A HANDFUL OF DUST, which made me just put my head down on my desk as if it was lights out / time out.

She was a big supporter of creativity and one of the things that we did in her class year-round was write our own books. We gave them "hardcovers" of cardboard and choose our cover design from a box of Contac paper... and then (unbelievably) we were given a needle and thread to bind them. During any free time if you felt like writing a book you were encouraged to do it, and I have a plastic container in the attic full of stories by young Mindy.

My teacher spotted me writing whenever I could, so she told me to pick what I thought was my best book and she would enter it into the Young Authors Competition.

I can't say for sure whether it was a contest, a conference, or a workshop. All I know is that I made it. So one Saturday I got up early, went somewhere (I don't know where), and spent the day with a bunch of other kids whose work had been chosen. I met either Byrd Baylor or Peter Parnell (I can't remember which one it was, I just remember this book), and someone had brought a bunch of desert animals for us to touch.

At one point we were put into groups and asked to share our books with one another. This is the moment that has remained clear to me right up to the present day. Each kid read their book out loud, and I thought every single one of them was better than mine. I remember my confidence slipping away as their talent outshone my own. I could tell you to this day what every one of their books was about.

Because I thought they were better writers than I was.

That still happens. Constantly. The curse of being both a writer and a reader is that you can hardly call reading a pleasure activity any longer. If you read something that you think is poorly done yet has sold many more copies than your own work, you have to wonder what they are doing right that you aren't. If you read something truly amazing you are transported as a reader, but the writer side of you plummets into a darkness because you don't think you will ever be as good as they are.

However, I think both experiences are humbling - and being humbled is a good thing for anyone. It makes you try harder, do better, work longer, push forward. If I ever believe that I am the best then I will stop improving, and I will have failed my readers.

I think about that Young Authors gathering quite often, and sometimes I wonder where those other kids in my group ended up. Not because I want proof that I was, indeed, better than them and have made a career out of writing, but because they were good, and I'd like to see what they are doing with their craft now. Because I guarantee you they still write.

My story LISSSSSSS (the trademark sound my fictitious pet dragon makes), is up on Matthew's site today, complete with my original artwork.

Oh, and yeah - the other kids had better illustrations, too.