So I just finished reading a novel that might've been just about perfect if not for the fact that the most prominent female character -- and one of the only female characters to appear throughout the whole book rather than in a scene or two -- is also:
a) one of the least developed characters in the book
b) plot-wise, mainly serves as an objective sounding board for the protagonist (though there are several other better-developed male characters who can and do serve this purpose)
c) repeatedly and primarily described in terms of her breasts
d) in the end, seems to be there to assure us that this man is a heterosexual, by giving him the opportunity to have heterosexual sex over the course of a plot in which sex is totally unnecessary.
This isn't a pulp or noir or detective story where genre tropes are informing this choice. And nothing would justify the first point anyway. It was enough for me to deduct a star in my Goodreads rating -- it doesn't help that there was such a dearth of female characters in general -- and would've been more if Goodreads did half-stars.
It got me thinking about the decision-making processes I had gone through recently in National Novel Writing Month this past November.
The first novel I finished -- after the usual years-since-childhood of starting many novels, getting a few pages or many brainstorming pages into them, and then moving on -- was a historical novel about the life of Jesus, during National Novel Writing Month many years ago. It's a good way to get over the mental hump of novel-writing: the process of constructing a beginning, middle, and end, developing an idea that is significantly longer than that of a short story, getting through the challenges of Act II, and so on. It makes you keep writing. I've written a good number of novels since, published a few, I did what I wanted to do: I learned how to get it done.
I hadn't written one in a while, so since my fiction writing agenda in 2015 was very informed by "going back to the beginning" -- writing stories in the genres where I started 25 years ago, etc -- I thought it would be a good time to do Nanowrimo again, so I did, and I got it done.
My 2015 novel takes place in an alternate 21st century where aquatic aliens landed on Earth in the early 20th century and colonized the deep sea. Due to the differences in living environments, contact since then has been sporadic and difficult, but the course of the 20th century unfolds differently. My protagonist, Shout, begins the story as a member of a church that was founded in 1970, a syncretic religion combining elements of Christianity and Judaism with the religion of the aliens, inspired by surprising coincidences in the aliens' scripture. In the 21st century, that religion falls apart when it'd discovered that the alien colonists consider their scripture a hoax, invented by a separate race of alien overseers and delivered to them sometime in their past. The story is in large part about how Shout deals with the dissolution of a religion he has spent more than half of his life in, and which was the center of his social and cultural world.
I decided Shout should be in his early 40s for two simple reasons: it's roughly my age, which makes it easy to relate, and since this is a new enough religion that most members were converts, it meant he had been a member long enough that the loss would be significant. But this brought up a serious question: should he be in a relationship?
If he's in a relationship with a fellow member of the church, then I'm writing about the effect of this church's dissolution on two people, not one, and of the effect they have on each other if and when they don't respond exactly the same way. That's an interesting story, but less introspective, less Dark Night of the Soul, than the one I had in mind, though I may always change my mind in revision. If he's in a relationship with someone who isn't and has never been a member of the church, the frictions might be even more difficult -- he'd be living with someone who might on some level be relieved that this religious difference was going away, or might expect him to give her religion (or lack thereof) a shot. Again -- interesting story, but didn't feel focused on the material I wanted.
So I established a breakup in the recent past as a result of his girlfriend leaving the church before he's ready to do so. The breakup is recent enough that he's not on the market.
What I didn't want to do was include a love interest that he meets over the course of the story -- a love interest who exists not because that's what the story is about, but because that's the arbitrary way to include a prominent female character, or because it's somehow necessary to establish the heterosexual red-bloodedness of the protagonist even in a story in which sex has no plot relevance.
On the one hand, that's one reason why, less than two weeks later, the love interest in this book I've just read stood out so much. On the other, the only reason I made this decision in the first place is because I was aware of how common that trope is. The interesting roles, the plot-moving roles -- the protagonist, the antagonist, the obstacle in this chapter, the person who needs to be convinced in that chapter, the ally from an unexpected place in this other chapter, the confidante over here, bonding over war stories over there, the mentor -- these roles all get filled by men, and then it feels weird to have a book that's just men (maybe it's a little gay, maybe they'll bump into each other backstage when they're getting dressed), so maybe a female victim is introduced in order to be avenged, or maybe a woman is introduced for men to fight over, or maybe a woman is introduced in order to sleep with. It's enough just to include them, right?
And even when it's not that bad, this "including a love interest just because for some reason a protagonist is supposed to have a love interest" trope has always felt lazy to me. There are so many other ways people fit together.
Just some Sunday morning thoughts.
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