Recent content by AElisabet

But this we all can agree on - if this had been your first post, there would have been no heat. We all want to ask these kind of questions of every character. I can be intemperate myself, and I could have phrased some of my responses better. But phrases like "Motherhood is time consuming"...

Kate Elliot has a good article here on writing female characters: Writing Women Characters as Human Beings | Tor.com She touches on pretty much everything in this thread, including how to avoid using stock female characters as a replacement for genuine character development (which is what...

No, I did not mean to insult - just to be allowed to own my own experience without having it be called unrealistic. You absolutely have a right to imagine. I didn't say child rearing was simple; I said it was not all consuming. I said women do other things while they raise children. The...

Well, reconciled? ::::extends hand of peace:::: :) Well rounded female characters are definitely out there - thinking of books like the Chalion series, or NK Jemison or the Robin Hobb's books (though she I find harder to get into, because she occasionally falls back on the Strong Female...

But no one said this, as was stated and clarified repeatedly above. No one is telling you what to write, or saying you have a bad imagination because you don't want to write something *yourself*. All of us have limited imaginations and varying tastes. Calling something "unrealistic" for other...

This. To not want to write that story? Of course there is nothing wrong with that. No one has to write every kind of story. No one even suggested that every writer should write every story. No one has to like every kind of story. I am not good at writing war stories. I don't find battle...

I think this is the real issue.

Thats not what I am saying. What I am saying is simply that female characters, who are mothers, in traditional roles, can have an adventurous fantasy arc, because they are capable of being mothers and other things at the same time, and that includes travelers, adventurers, migrants, etc. That...

Yes. So many times, yes.

No, I heard the "especially." And I was being fasicious about the juice boxes. Mothering, to put it more simply, is, in any culture, something women do while they do a lot of other things. It's not all consuming, sucking up every second of a woman's day. Women mother while accomplishing a...

When I think of Strong Female Characters I dislike, I think of characters like in Graceling (ugh) and even Arya Stark (who along with Jon Snow is one of - IMHO - the more boring characters in Game of Thrones). I read a little Tamora Pierce and couldn't really connect with Alanna either. So...

I'm on it! I'm on it! I'm working on an epic fantasy with a heroine who is also a mother (or at least becomes one halfway through the story and it is central). Her own mother is also a major protagonist (and not dead! Totally alive and central to the plot well into grandmotherhood.) It goes...

Yes, this is often the case. Clarification noted. So we can agree :)

a) Just want to get out of the way that I think a book can "say" something to society without being propaganda. A GREAT book finds the universal in particular. Sure, some books are propaganda, and I don't care for that. But what makes them propaganda isn't that they have a moral center, but...

I would say 3rd Limited and 1st Person are very different. I think 1st is actually closer to Omni in terms of tone - there is a narrator telling the story. They can be funny, serious, unreliable, ironic, etc. But there is a person telling the story. They own that story. A connection with...