Showing your work

There's a question I've been meaning to raise for a while, but I've put it off because I couldn't suggest an answer. Then in last week's post, I sort of stumbled on a partial answer, so I'll go ahead and raise the question.

With the advent of internet celebrity and, perhaps, the "maker revolution," there seems to me to be a trend toward audiences wanting to see the work that goes into art. I first noticed this when my sister introduced me to the music duo Pomplamoose. Specifically, she showed me this video:

 

Pomplamoose's videos are brilliant, but they are the opposite of "slick" (meaning, in this case, apparently effortless, hiding the mechanisms behind the finished product). In fact they go out of their way to make sure you understand what they're doing so you can appreciate it.* You can see the same idea at work in their "video song" music videos, where they scrupulously show you the origin of all the sounds they use in the song:

 

I know that music like this tended to be a sort of blur to me: whole instrumental tracks could play without me realizing I was hearing them. I imagine lots of people experience music similarly. Playing Guitar Hero 2 was a revelation for me, and after that I started being able to tease out the lead, rhythm, and bass guitar parts in songs I was listening to. By the same token, I can hear more going on in Pomplamoose's songs because they signaled for me to listen for them.

So musicians can show the components of their songs. Visual artists can record videos of their progress for fans. I had trouble figuring out how writers could take advantage of the same phenomenon. Surely no one would want to watch me write live--it would be sort of like reading a finished piece, except only a few words would appear every minute.

Neil Gaiman has at least a partial solution, I realized. Like I talked about last week, his writing lets the reader see his work of recombining familiar elements. It brings readers closer to the actual process of writing, which is more about arranging ideas than simply having them. It dispels the hazardous myth that writers just conceive their ideas in perfect completeness and then write them down (a process which I suspect many people imagine takes no more time than reading).

I shouldn't be resentful, but the art-as-magic myth doesn't do anyone any favors. As my friend Elinor Diamond pointed out recently, writing is work. The writers of yesteryear worked hard to give the impression that they weren't working hard. Some of them flat-out lied about their writing process in order to make themselves seem like some sort of word-wizards.

The dynamics are changing, and wizardry doesn't pay anymore. The process is becoming part of the product. I'm sure there's more to this puzzle than I have figured out.

* Even in their more out-there videos, they eschew a reaction of "how did they do that?" in favor of a "I can't believe they did that."

What do we want? Strong female characters! What do we mean? I'm glad you asked...

How the time goes by. One may justly ask me what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging. Well, I’ve been watching TV. I’ve been working. I’ve been reading my friend Elinor Diamond’s blog.

I had the neat opportunity to write a guest post for Ms Diamond, and that should be going up today. If you’re interested in some observations of mine on narrative voice and the reader’s place in a story, check it out there.

Meanwhile, Ms Diamond’s recent post opining on “strong female characters” has caused me to start opining in turn.

As she pointed out, the concept of the “strong female character” has drawn some fire lately. Once we started talking about SFCs as something that should exist—perhaps something that writers should be applauded for creating—writers naturally started trying to create SFCs in larger quantities. Yet as a general rule, more people want to be applauded than actually want to do something they find difficult. The result has been a glut of SFC-bait—characters who we’re supposed to appreciate as progressive but who don’t actually do the women of the world any favors.

Part of the problem is people misunderstanding the meaning of “strong.” Maybe it’s not entirely fair to blame them, because when we call for “strong female characters” I don’t think that’s precisely what we mean (I’ll get to that later). But those of us who call for SFCs in media are not (I hope) satisfied with female characters who are merely muscular, merely violent, merely invincible,* merely obnoxious, or who are active when surrounded by minor characters but become passive when they interact with the main (male) cast.

I don’t think we should publicly abandon the idea of the strong female character. It would be a shame if the idea fell out of style without achieving its purpose (or worse, because it had been terminally derailed). But we need to ask some clarifying questions.

People have already been asking what qualifies as a “strong female character.” Precisely, when we demand SFCs in our media, what exactly are we asking for?

I think, as a general rule, what we (I?) really want to see is female characters who shape the story according to their own motivations. That’s what I would call “narrative strength.”**

Some of the better examples from media I’ve recently ingested aren’t exactly egalitarian. Having finished the first season of the new House of Cards, I find Zoe Barnes an interesting liminal case. I actually argued with Girlfriend about whether or not she qualified, but I think if she isn’t an SFC, then the dividing line passes very close to her. I’m going to try to break down the case for her without significant spoilers.

Zoe’s ambition is a major force in the show. Only one other female character competes with her in terms of narrative influence, and in my opinion Zoe is the more influential. She certainly overwhelms the influence of the other characters in her own sphere. It’s only up against Frank, our main character/villain, that she’s clearly in over her head.

That may be the first objection raised against Zoe’s status as an SFC—that the strongest male character in the show exerts so much power over her—but I would argue a key distinction. She doesn’t fade into the woodwork when she shares the screen with Frank—instead, the struggle between Frank and Zoe is one of the main elements of the story. As for her being in over her head, if we respect the characters we write we must allow them to get into trouble. A protagonist certainly needs enough rope to hang themselves with, and Zoe takes her turns as protagonist.

A stronger objection may be the way she works for her goals. She trades on her gender, both offering sex and using gender politics as a bludgeon when one or the other will get her what she wants. It’s not exactly role-model behavior. It’s less of an issue in a show like House of Cards, where the morally uncompromised are a vanishing minority, and a character doesn’t need to be sympathetic to be narratively strong.

Maybe this highlights a shortcoming of the term “strong female character,” though. After all, a media universe filled with “strong” women who trade primarily on their sexuality would be a pretty regressive one, even if those women exerted disproportionate influence on their stories. But the problem of whether we should depict this sort of thing at all turns into two questions, and I’m a little afraid to chase them down because of how long this post is getting already. I’ll make a go of it, though.

The first question: What means can a strong female character use to get what she wants? Must she be a role model? I think girls deserve to see female characters in media who use a variety of empowering means to achieve their goals, but I don’t think media for adults*** can afford to completely ignore that women have certain disadvantages in our society, and a few “dirty tricks” that they can use to get ahead if their goals are bigger than the accepted means at their disposal.

The second question: Are strong female characters descriptive or aspirational? That is, are we showing the world as we see it, or are we showing the world as we want it to be in hopes that life will imitate art? I think the truth for creators is usually a little of both. But what are we asking creators to do when we ask for SFCs? To show us what women can do of in this world, or to show us what women should be able to do in a better one? (How strong a distinction this is is a function of your setting and your worldview.)

As a creator, I think at some point you need to be honest with your characters. They can’t come alive as long as they’re artificially constrained by a lesson we want them to teach. They need to pursue their own goals as they see fit, with the means available to them.

Of course all of this hair-splitting would be less necessary if there were more active female characters in media. We can’t really be honest with characters until we don’t feel the need to make them representative of anything other than themselves.

* Admittedly, we’ve been dealing for centuries with male characters with no personality outside of their proficiency with violence, but writers don’t expect a pat on the head for writing them.

** This isn’t to completely ignore egalitarian portrayals of women—that is, women in traditionally masculine roles: warriors, leaders, any job that usually ends with “-man.” But 1) that’s not exactly the cutting edge of 21st-Century progress, and 2) doing it lazily leads to tokenism. Independent goals and narrative agency are the antidote.

*** If your little girl is watching House of Cards then the portrayal of women in media probably isn’t her biggest obstacle to success.