Why this question annoys me

“How do you write such strong female heroines (sic)?”

Ever since Dealing with Dragons came out, I’ve gotten this question (or the “Why do you…” variation) pretty much every time somebody asks for an interview. My first reaction – which I have given in to, more than once – is to look blank and respond, “Don’t you know any women?”

The question makes  me cranky. Not because it’s common – “Where do you get your ideas?” has been the most common question writers get asked since forever, and while it makes me cranky to hear it yet again, it doesn’t make me nearly as cranky as the strong female heroines one.

And that is my point: all writers get asked where they get their ideas. But I don’t know any male writers who’ve been asked why/how they write “such strong male heroes.” Or why they don’t write “strong women.”

The “strong women” question also annoys me because the folks who ask rarely like any of my serious answers (and yes, “Don’t you know any women?” is a serious answer, even if it’s deliberately phrased a bit flippantly). I think it’s because even the serious answers are not what they expect.

The absolutely boiled-down-to-its-essence true answer to “Why did you write that?” is always “Because it’s what I wanted to write.” Yes, sometimes an editor asks for X story, but I’ve turned down as many of those suggestions as I’ve accepted…and the ones I’ve accepted, I’ve accepted because they tickled my backbrain and got me interested in writing that story. (Including, on one memorable occasion, the anthology invitation that I wrote out the rejection for, then three hours later had to tear up the envelope [and waste a stamp!] because in the interim I’d written the entire first draft of a short story that was perfect for it.)

I write what I write because these are the people I’m interested in and these are the stories I want to write/read. Even the Star Wars novelizations, where the characters and the plot and the dialog were all already there, were an amazing fun challenge. (And getting to know what happened before everyone else had nothing to do with it. Honest.)

The “How do you…” version of the Strong Female Characters question is annoying for a different reason. Just asking it carries the subtext that writing a strong female character is somehow harder and more difficult than writing a strong male character. Or any other kind of character. Otherwise, why not just ask “How do you write strong characters?” Or better yet, “How do you write characters?”

And “How do you write characters?” is not nearly as annoying a question, even if the answer should be obvious: One draws on the pieces of oneself that are similar to the character, and one uses one’s imagination, experience with other people, and a bunch of research to fill in the parts of the character that aren’t similar. But people are so complicated that one can natter on endlessly about the different ways a particular writer goes through imagining and researching in order to portray a character who is older, or younger, or shyer, or of a different cultural background, or different in any other way, major or minor, from the writer him/herself.

People are complicated. Characters are therefore complicated, especially if one wants to show them as realistic and well-rounded. (I contend that cardboard characters are a writing flaw, not a character flaw; cardboard characters are, in some universe where they are actually real, just as complicated as every other person. It’s just that the writer didn’t capture it on the page for some reason.)

Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting are neither more nor less complicated than an American civil war captain or a samurai warrior of the Heian period. They’re just complicated in different directions.

Furthermore, no matter how many adjectives you put on the noun, not all “strong blonde tall thin black-eyed crooked-toothed snarky guilt-ridden one-armed intelligent female heroines” are exactly alike. Most of them are not even in the same neighborhood. The problem is not “writing a strong character;” it’s writing this specific character, who isn’t exactly like anyone else, even if he/she comes close in some ways. Different people are strong (or shy, or sarcastic, or enthusiastic) in different ways; they express their strength (or shyness, or sarcasm, or enthusiasm) according to their own complicated, individual one-of-a-kind personality.

Also note that writers are people, which means they, too, are complicated individuals with different processes. What one writer finds impossibly hard, some other writer is guaranteed to find impossibly easy. Process is endlessly fascinating because “how I do it” is different from how you do it, how she does it, how he does it, and how they do it. Which means, in turn, that even if six writers were to successfully portray the exact same character in the exact same way (say, for a series of novels based on, oh, a hit movie or TV show), they would each have a different “how” that got them there.

Which means that ultimately, what annoys me about this question is the assumption that there is one, and only one, right answer, some process that can be applied by any and every writer to get the desired end result.

There isn’t. Trust me on this one.