Tag: writing

The Artemis Complex

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I finally got to reading Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers (which is totally awesome and I’ll post more on that later) and I couldn’t help noticing the cover – another girl with a crossbow (Ismae actually has a larger arsenal than that).  This year with the release of The Hunger Games and Brave, girls with bows and arrows have become the new chic for YA heroines.  In my story, Aerie, my main character is a good archer to fit with the wind theme.  So what’s the deal with this set up?  Well, I think that as we move away from the virgin/whoring bitch dichotomy, we’ve set ourselves a new archetype – Artemis.

Even among writers, there’s a writing subtext and subconscious that we all play into – and the new ideal is the dark Greco-Roman goddess of the moon and the hunt.  Greek mythology was one of my favorite topics in school, and my favorite goddess was Artemis.  Of all the goddesses on Olympus, she was untouchable but unafraid of getting her hands dirty.  I think that’s why so many types are modeled after her now.  Artemis was the virgin goddess of taking names and kicking ass.  While being a virgin isn’t a bad thing, it’s still overused as a hallmark of female noble character.  We still end up with a new rendition of the virgin/whore song we’re trying to stop dancing to.  Most of the girls who sleep around in romance novels are either raped, crazy/evil or turned into props.  If a heroine has sex, then all of a sudden we’re in erotica.  I find this particularly grating when I see it in sci-fi and epic fantasy.  Can’t we have female main characters that aren’t oversexed or overly celibate?  Why are we unable to walk lines in fiction that we seem to live along in modern Western culture?

While I love reading and playing with the Artemis archetype, I hope that it doesn’t become the next version of Mary Sue.  There’s so much more that can be done with girls other than switching one type of bow for another.  I think this is part of the reason why there are so many YA novels aimed at girls – there’s still a lot of coping being done in feminism.  There’s so much conflict in the formation of identity – how much do we go by old rules and how much do we make up on our way?  I adore Margaret Atwood’s books on how to these ideas conflict and that we find ourselves at this turmoil of what we see ourselves as and how much of the past we allow to guide our identity.  Historical novels will always pose an issue because there is a precedent that can’t be ignored easily.  My family came from a fairly conservative culture, and it was obvious to see first hand the amount of hypocrisy and self-flagellation over women’s roles of those espousing those views.  I’m willing to bet  it exists everywhere.

Admittedly, Artemis is a better turn than Hera, and I think we’re moving forward there’s still a long road ahead of us.  Virgins aren’t bad people, nor does being a virgin make someone good.  The same goes for women who have sex.  There just needs to be a greater push away from the fear of female sexuality, especially among female writers.  I say this as I look at “creative choices” that make me not want to let any of my family know about my writing.  Recently, I was at a crossroads when deciding what direction to take the leading lady of Unhexed.  I was basing my character off Rogue from The X-Men, and the idea of Magdalene asylums came up, which was a setting I wanted to explore for some time.  I wanted her to experience living in one, but it was a place for whores — my character wasn’t a whore.  And then this  stupid voice in the back of my head asked, ‘Why not? She’s cursed and her life’s damn horrible and she’s a great character in spite of that.’  The more I thought about it, the more it gave so many different dimensions to her interactions with the other characters.  Also, I remembered so many “other women” that have gotten bad treatment to be the foil for the heroines in romance novel and thought – this was my chance to look at how women who aren’t virgins or wives don’t get taken seriously, how easy it is to write someone off as a “whore.”  It’s still an issue faced by most of the world today.

So girls with crossbows, take aim, you’ve still got a long fight ahead of you.

Every Journey Begins with a Single Step… And a Stumble or Two…

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Most great stories begin with an event that shakes the hero (or heroine!) out of the usual grind and into an unforeseen adventure.  I would say my moment occurred when I was twelve years old when I decided to start writing fiction.  I had been obsessed with books from the very beginning, I always had one nearby even when I wasn't old enough to read.  As I grew up, I used to act out stories with my toys or I'd have some tall tale to tell until someone would frustratingly say I ought to take all my ideas and write them down.  One day, I had an idea and decided to give it a try.  My first story was a young adult space opera story that I wrote by hand and finished in junior high school, which fell short of my goal of writing a whole novel but I did finish the whole story.  Since that moment, I've had assassins playing with politics in ancient Greece, rogue government agents trying to choose sides in a cyberpunk setting, a steampunk Cinderella and much more…

During high school, I wrote day and night filling page after page of words and comments of how crazy I might just be.  It became a way of experiencing life – if I could write about it, I could make sense of it.  I looked at every incident and instance that occurred around me as a story in the making.  Then, another important twist happened when I started college.  I stopped writing as much.  Considering that writing was such a huge part of my life, it was also a point when I had to choose between writing and experiencing new things.  I went with the latter because I knew that in the end, seeing more of the world would make me a better writer.  During that time, I worked on a young adult coming of age trilogy called The Destroyers, which followed a girl through three major points in her life – senior year of high school, the summer before her last year in college when her sister gets married, and ending with her best friend's wedding the summer after she graduates from law school.  The manuscript was long and scattered all over the place.

By the time I graduated from college, I had problems writing again more steadily.  A friend of mine suggested using fan fiction as training wheels to get back on track, so I spent some time dabbling in it until I felt ready to get back on the horse to the road to becoming an author.  Earlier this year, I felt the urge to take the leap once again and stick with it.  I have all these amazing stories I want to share, I just have to make the effort. 

And with these words I make not my first step, but a return to the road I wish to travel.

Reviews, reviews, reviews…

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We’ve all been led astray by resounding numbers of 5 star reviews of a book, only to discover our own marks would be closer to 2 or 3 stars, or a rarer occasion of upping a 2 to a 4.  That’s a large reason why I take reviews with a boulder of salt, sometimes the book is positioned incorrectly for its genre and people have a knee-jerk reaction to take away stars for that or they see the story with rose colored glasses since it fulfills a specific fantasy they have.

There’s another way I judge reviews to figure out if I’ll try the book or not — how articulate are the most highly ranked reviews?  Sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have customers vote for the best reviews to make it to the top of the reviews, so it gives a sense of whether the there’s a flood of disingenuous 5 stars when most people feel it’s closer to 2.  I use those reviews to determine what kind of writing people that read the book like — if the top review is articulate, precise and well-written, I’m more likely to give it a try than a review that was written clumsily.  This isn’t fool proof of course, because sometimes a story just doesn’t strike the right chords with you, or there aren’t enough reviews (I’d say as long as there is at least one extremely low and one fairly high, along with three others, this method works well enough).

So I secretly judge writers by their readers.  It’s been a pretty effective method so far, so I’ll keep using it.

Writer Age Stamp Part Deux

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While reading Sarah Dessen’s This Lullaby, I felt like the teenagers were older than they were.  I liked the book, and Remy especially but she sounded more like someone in her twenties than late teens.  Even after the early college Psychology and Sociology classes given to us in high school, we were psychoanalyzing each other pretty often.  But high schoolers don’t often dwell on the way their behaviors are habits the way Remy does.

Teens are less hampered by trying to analyze long-standing behaviors or to treat something they did for two years as a long-standing behavior.  They’re still trying out new things and most don’t feel bogged down by the past in that way.  Remy’s reflectiveness felt a little beyond her years, particularly the way she is about sex, drinking and smoking.  She seems weary of it though only eighteen, and I haven’t really heard folks sound like that until they hit their quarter life crisis.  She reminds me more of people’s reactions to graduating college.  Graduating from high school, there are still so many open doors and opportunities waiting, but at the end of college, you’ve made your bed and have to lie in it.  Remy’s lack of seeing college as a new beginning was the primary reason I got that vibe.  It seemed like she had too much experience for the very narrow time frame she had been in her party girl phase.  Even if she was a serial dater for about a year, she still couldn’t have had enough boyfriends and relationships to really draw the conclusions she’s coming to.

There was too much “finality” with Remy’s descriptions to seem like she was still a teen.

How Writers Age Stamp Themselves

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I loved the book Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins.  It was an amazing story with deep and rich characters, and I fell in love with Etienne and Anna over and over again on each page. That said, the one and only thing that bothered me about the book was the use of technology.  Or lack thereof.

The characters have computers and email, but the technology felt very 1990s.  Anna was solely dependent on phone calls and occasional email to communicate with her friends and family back in America.  I’m part of the first generation to grow up with Facebook, Twitter and everyone in class having a cell phone, so I immediately was confused by the lack of communication.  In college, students abroad felt like they were still at school with us through pictures and status updates and instant messaging and Skype.  My best friend and I went to high school together, but 80% of our relationship was online based.  I spend hours chatting with friends on messenger services.  My cousins that live internationally send pictures and messages from their BlackBerry Messenger service so there are no fees.  While reading, the emails were entirely text based and there were no mentions of any of the technology that is pretty standard in this day and age.

Did this make a difference in the overall story?  Well, yes and no.  The characters and the story were still amazing, but it’s anachronistic.  How we send and receive information does have an impact on how things play out.

1) Pictures — Anna doesn’t take pictures with her new friends, no one is taking pictures.  These days, if you go to Paris (or even the corner market) someone is always snapping pictures of everything and somehow they end up online.  Senior year of high school, we took as many pictures and video-taped as much as we could with anyone we could.  If Anna went to Paris recently, she would be photographing and uploading like crazy, as would her friend Bridgette.  Also, this would have alerted Anna immediately to the fact that Toph and Bridgette were dating or something was going on.

2) Phone calls/email — I mentioned this earlier.  My friend joked that I did have a valid gripe with the whole phone call thing once in a blue moon notion, and that today your phone can probably make coffee (hey, there’s probably an app for that somewhere).  Also, even though cell phones get mentioned, they’re not as pervasive in the story as in real life.  I know people in third world countries with better technology than the novel explored.  Anna would have Skyped with her little brother if she missed him so much.  The occasional emails would have still occurred, but it being the majority of her communication with her best friend seemed odd.  Toph wouldn’t have called her, he would be posting on her wall and commenting on everything she posted.  There would have been a greater chance of them staying connected while she was away as well, and I know people who have made their entire relationship digital while the other had to be away and stayed together through the other person’s return.  That’s the power of communication today — you don’t have to be there to be there.

3) No Social Network — It didn’t need to be Facebook, but anyone in school in the last few years has an account there.  Even when I was in high school, we had Friendster and Xanga and LiveJournal that people used.  I can’t imagine a world where you’re not blogging or updating, and the amount of high school drama that caused.  Again, this would have changed Bridgette and Anna’s relationship because it wouldn’t have been as disconnected, and Anna would have a clearer idea what was going on back home.  She would be spending time looking at profile pictures to remember her friends and relationship status is kind of a dead giveaway.  Also, she would have friended her new friends at school and learned more about them that way rather than talking.  This is a huge thing that changed the social dynamic of the modern world and how people get acquainted and stay in contact.  People don’t ask if you’re seeing someone anymore, they check your profile status.  Also, all bands these days keep website or host a web page.  To not see Anna fussing over a guy’s website or profile was odd.

Not every current YA story needs to have mentions of technology, but in this particular instance it really dated the book and its author because a subplot was a breakdown in communication due to technological limitations.  Basic utilities of daily life were unavailable, and that’s something that makes writing YA difficult these days.  The speed of change in the way we communicate rapidly and rabidly changed in a span of less than ten years.  I think the college interns should get a peek at these manuscripts to make sure that loose ends like this don’t fray the story.