Writing Strong Women
If I were to tell you that I set out on a mission to write strong women, that would be complete and utter bullshit.
I started writing when I was quite young - I say eleven, though my mother insists it was earlier. At the time, I was super sick with ME/CFS; though at eleven I was a little better than the preceding few years, in which I spent a lot of my time on the couch, I still wasn't exactly radiating energy and enthusiasm.
There wasn't much I could do but read and write - and I did both. I read voraciously, to the point where my mother stopped trying to read ahead for books above my grade level to make sure they were appropriate, and just trusted that I'd let her know if I didn't think I should be reading them. (I did.) My penchant for writing strong but imperfect female characters undoubtedly can at least in part be traced back to my reading material; I read books like Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Alanna the Lioness, Rose Daughter - books by amazing women (Jane Austen, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tamora Pierce, Robin McKinley) who wrote complex, strong, damaged, flawed, and above all real people. And later, strong women in television also fed into my writing tendencies: Buffy, from Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Captain Janeway and B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager; hell, even Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus and Carmen from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? All kinds of women, all kinds of worlds, all kinds of jobs and aspirations and fears. I'm not sure it ever occurred to me until I was older that well-rounded, complicated women aren't always the norm, that they aren't always well-represented in fiction and film and television.
Then there are the women in my family. My mother is an amazing woman who grew up helping take care of her younger siblings, battled her way through a lot of shit years and a lot of demons, worked as a dental hygienist, lived in San Francisco and Berkeley and Portland in the 1970s, worked in free clinics, spent time counselling others, very much advocates counselling for everyone to deal with their own shit before passing it on to their kids, travels the world with her friends and ignores societal conventions that say senior citizens are supposed to live quiet and sedate lives, and, most importantly for me, never gave up on me no matter how much I hated her in all those years I was sick. Sick, angry children can be incredibly difficult to deal with - I was severely depressed, I was mean, I was angry, I was violent, and above all I was too sick to do anything. My mother gave up working to take care of me and my older sister, and I will be forever grateful for all of the time and energy and love that my mother gave me. Strength is not only about being able to march out and face the monsters. My mom is kick-ass in so many ways.
And then there's my maternal grandmother, who grew up a tomboy on a farm in Michigan with no running water and then moved out West, where she knew no one, to work for the airlines. She married my grandfather after knowing him nine days because he was educated and she wanted her children to be able to get an education. The fact that I'm a reader and a writer, that I have three degrees under my belt, is in no small part because of my grandmother. She travelled the world until she was in her seventies, survived back surgery, thyroid cancer, and brain surgery, and lived for nine years after an emergency tracheotomy left her with a tube in her neck through which to breathe. Even in death she was damn stubborn; she'd fail and fail and we'd think that it was the end, only to find her standing at the end of her bed demanding to know why she couldn't walk on her own.
There are other strong women in my family: my great-grandmothers on my mom's side; my paternal grandmother, who immigrated from Germany at the age of nine; my sister; my aunts. I have, my whole life, been surrounded by strong women, women who deal with the shit that life serves them and carry on. Strong women are role models by their courage, their compassion, their ability to accept their flaws, and their strength to work through whatever life deals them.
And then there's me. When I was eleven years old and angry and sick and depressed, I wrote to make some of the pain go away. And I wrote girls who could do things that I couldn't. At that age, I hadn't yet developed my own writing voice, so a lot of other writers snuck in and out and I worked. But my heroines could run and fight and go on adventures - they could do everything I couldn't do. I gave them the abilities I wished I had and set them loose on their fictional worlds, letting them act as surrogates. Then, my women were nearly invincible, much as I wished I could be myself. As I grew older, I began to develop women with fears and flaws to accompany their strengths, pulling from my own life experience as well as my observations and knowledge of my own family and the world.
I don't actively set out to write strong women anymore. They write themselves, and more often than not they tell me in no uncertain terms that there are certain things they cannot, or will not do, or that the things I make them do will scar them in ways that will have to be dealt with later on. Having dealt with the deaths of my grandmother and my father in my early twenties, death has begun to write itself into my work more strongly, but the way that it affects my heroines is not always the way that it affected me, just as relationships between heroines and their fathers or mothers or siblings often don't in any way relate to my relationships with my family. My heroine Jo, in a YA dystopian work, carries her mother's dead body home through a storm and stays with it for two days before anyone finds her. This isn't the main focus of the book, but it damages Jo and leaves her vulnerable and scarred in ways that she won't realise for a long time to come. But it doesn't stop her from going out and trying to find her sister. As a child, Amy, in the science-fiction novel Empire's Legacy, observes her father murder her mother, and that single action leaves her with anxieties about letting people get close - she neither trusts nor loves. She is clever and strong and an excellent pilot; she has a doctorate in Empire Studies; but her childhood has left her damaged in ways that she can't recognise and, even if she could, she doesn't know how to fix. Spencer Murray is an alcoholic, angry, depressed writer grappling with the death of her aunt, a death that she considers her fault; a mother who never really wanted her; and a father who's been dead for years. Her self-destructive tendencies threaten to send her spiralling out of control, but I consider her strong nevertheless.
Every strong woman I know is strong in a unique way, and part of what makes her strong are her flaws - her weaknesses, her anxieties, her fears, the mistakes she made in the past. I write strong women like the women I know - and more often than not, they teach me more about how to be a heroine and a strong female protagonist than I knew when I started writing. Strength is not a matter of being able to fire a gun, endure an arduous trek, or survive torture. It is a quiet ability to survive, persist, and learn, to acknowledge your own weaknesses and strive to be better without abusing yourself if you sometimes fall down. We all fall down. The important thing is to get back up again.
I started writing when I was quite young - I say eleven, though my mother insists it was earlier. At the time, I was super sick with ME/CFS; though at eleven I was a little better than the preceding few years, in which I spent a lot of my time on the couch, I still wasn't exactly radiating energy and enthusiasm.
There wasn't much I could do but read and write - and I did both. I read voraciously, to the point where my mother stopped trying to read ahead for books above my grade level to make sure they were appropriate, and just trusted that I'd let her know if I didn't think I should be reading them. (I did.) My penchant for writing strong but imperfect female characters undoubtedly can at least in part be traced back to my reading material; I read books like Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Alanna the Lioness, Rose Daughter - books by amazing women (Jane Austen, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tamora Pierce, Robin McKinley) who wrote complex, strong, damaged, flawed, and above all real people. And later, strong women in television also fed into my writing tendencies: Buffy, from Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Captain Janeway and B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager; hell, even Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus and Carmen from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? All kinds of women, all kinds of worlds, all kinds of jobs and aspirations and fears. I'm not sure it ever occurred to me until I was older that well-rounded, complicated women aren't always the norm, that they aren't always well-represented in fiction and film and television.
Then there are the women in my family. My mother is an amazing woman who grew up helping take care of her younger siblings, battled her way through a lot of shit years and a lot of demons, worked as a dental hygienist, lived in San Francisco and Berkeley and Portland in the 1970s, worked in free clinics, spent time counselling others, very much advocates counselling for everyone to deal with their own shit before passing it on to their kids, travels the world with her friends and ignores societal conventions that say senior citizens are supposed to live quiet and sedate lives, and, most importantly for me, never gave up on me no matter how much I hated her in all those years I was sick. Sick, angry children can be incredibly difficult to deal with - I was severely depressed, I was mean, I was angry, I was violent, and above all I was too sick to do anything. My mother gave up working to take care of me and my older sister, and I will be forever grateful for all of the time and energy and love that my mother gave me. Strength is not only about being able to march out and face the monsters. My mom is kick-ass in so many ways.
And then there's my maternal grandmother, who grew up a tomboy on a farm in Michigan with no running water and then moved out West, where she knew no one, to work for the airlines. She married my grandfather after knowing him nine days because he was educated and she wanted her children to be able to get an education. The fact that I'm a reader and a writer, that I have three degrees under my belt, is in no small part because of my grandmother. She travelled the world until she was in her seventies, survived back surgery, thyroid cancer, and brain surgery, and lived for nine years after an emergency tracheotomy left her with a tube in her neck through which to breathe. Even in death she was damn stubborn; she'd fail and fail and we'd think that it was the end, only to find her standing at the end of her bed demanding to know why she couldn't walk on her own.
There are other strong women in my family: my great-grandmothers on my mom's side; my paternal grandmother, who immigrated from Germany at the age of nine; my sister; my aunts. I have, my whole life, been surrounded by strong women, women who deal with the shit that life serves them and carry on. Strong women are role models by their courage, their compassion, their ability to accept their flaws, and their strength to work through whatever life deals them.
And then there's me. When I was eleven years old and angry and sick and depressed, I wrote to make some of the pain go away. And I wrote girls who could do things that I couldn't. At that age, I hadn't yet developed my own writing voice, so a lot of other writers snuck in and out and I worked. But my heroines could run and fight and go on adventures - they could do everything I couldn't do. I gave them the abilities I wished I had and set them loose on their fictional worlds, letting them act as surrogates. Then, my women were nearly invincible, much as I wished I could be myself. As I grew older, I began to develop women with fears and flaws to accompany their strengths, pulling from my own life experience as well as my observations and knowledge of my own family and the world.
I don't actively set out to write strong women anymore. They write themselves, and more often than not they tell me in no uncertain terms that there are certain things they cannot, or will not do, or that the things I make them do will scar them in ways that will have to be dealt with later on. Having dealt with the deaths of my grandmother and my father in my early twenties, death has begun to write itself into my work more strongly, but the way that it affects my heroines is not always the way that it affected me, just as relationships between heroines and their fathers or mothers or siblings often don't in any way relate to my relationships with my family. My heroine Jo, in a YA dystopian work, carries her mother's dead body home through a storm and stays with it for two days before anyone finds her. This isn't the main focus of the book, but it damages Jo and leaves her vulnerable and scarred in ways that she won't realise for a long time to come. But it doesn't stop her from going out and trying to find her sister. As a child, Amy, in the science-fiction novel Empire's Legacy, observes her father murder her mother, and that single action leaves her with anxieties about letting people get close - she neither trusts nor loves. She is clever and strong and an excellent pilot; she has a doctorate in Empire Studies; but her childhood has left her damaged in ways that she can't recognise and, even if she could, she doesn't know how to fix. Spencer Murray is an alcoholic, angry, depressed writer grappling with the death of her aunt, a death that she considers her fault; a mother who never really wanted her; and a father who's been dead for years. Her self-destructive tendencies threaten to send her spiralling out of control, but I consider her strong nevertheless.
Every strong woman I know is strong in a unique way, and part of what makes her strong are her flaws - her weaknesses, her anxieties, her fears, the mistakes she made in the past. I write strong women like the women I know - and more often than not, they teach me more about how to be a heroine and a strong female protagonist than I knew when I started writing. Strength is not a matter of being able to fire a gun, endure an arduous trek, or survive torture. It is a quiet ability to survive, persist, and learn, to acknowledge your own weaknesses and strive to be better without abusing yourself if you sometimes fall down. We all fall down. The important thing is to get back up again.
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