Forgive the introspection, but I saw shaggydogstail's list of five fics she'd written about women, and I got to thinking about the women I've included in my stories and the issues I'd had writing about them. (There's a whole separate discussion we could have about why I'm writing mostly m/m slash or m-centic gen and why women don't figure as strongly in my fic as they do in my life, but we'll leave that for another day.) I'm going to try to raise some general issues about writing women below, so don't worry, you don't need to have read the individual stories to read this discussion.

Quick disclaimer? I don't think the fics actually *do* everything I say I wanted them to do (i.e., my analysis is stronger than my fic, and sometimes includes ideas that never made it onto the page). But these are some of the issues I was thinking about while writing or rereading them, for whatever that's worth.



1. Minerva McGonagall in A House Divided. This is story about Minerva's attempts to get a twenty-year-old Sirius to reconcile with his dying father. Ultimately, we learn that the attempts were misguided; Sirius has been disowned by his family and his father did not want to see him again, after all.

I think one of the most difficult issues I have writing about strong women is dealing realistically with strength; it's all too easy to make characters like Minerva or Lily not only strong, but morally upright and unrealistically consistent. (Something I do myself on occasion, as with last night's fic. *cough*) What I was trying to get at here was a Minerva who was both very strong but also on the wrong track--sympathetic to arguments by various Black family members that families should stay together, suspicious that Sirius might be the one unwilling to reconcile. She's brave and fair-minded but not always in the right, and I tried to see her as someone who might be admirable, nevertheless. It's surprising sometimes just how much I want Minerva to be stronger (tougher, wittier, better) than the other characters.

2. Hermione Granger in The Unusual, Exceptional, and Statistically Remarkable Hermione Granger, Age 21. This is ostensibly a coming out story about a post-series Hermione who gets together with Pansy Parkinson, but it's also about Hermione's coming-to-terms with a life that will be defined by personal--not just professional--accomplishments.

This isn't so complicated, but it still strikes me as an issue worth mentioning: I haven't yet met a woman who didn't have something to say about the difficulty balancing work and family or personal identities. It sounds so cold put that way, but I think the lived experience of not-wanting-to-be-defined-by-one-or-the-other is an emotionally charged issue for many of us. Hermione is suffering from too much success in one part of life and not enough in another, so she was fun to write about. (And hopefully she'll forgive me for mocking her concerns ever so gently.)

3. Remus/Rita Lupin in The Universe is a Procession, a remix of this fic by busaikko. This is a post-series story about a fortysomething Remus living in the Muggle world, contemplating a gender change and falling in love with an exiled Severus Snape.

I had real difficulty with this story, and not just for the obvious reasons (that is, the transgender themes, which I'm not sure I handled very realistically). The dynamic of the story is that Remus is uncertain about his own gender status but always a step more comfortable with it than Snape, who's attracted to him/her despite himself. Remus is very aware of this attraction and plays to it. It was astonishing difficult for me--someone who's always been aggressively uninterested in her appearance--to imagine this, to take Remus' attention to make-up and clothes seriously, as part of the way he is redefining himself and relating to Snape. Also, this turned out to be a story of love being (more or less) blind to gender, which was an issue I was and still am rather conflicted about. I'm not sure how successfully these themes come across in the story, but I have a lot of affection for the fic and its protagonist because they were so hard to write.

4. Arabella Figg in Voldemort's Return: A Love Story. Batty, cat-loving Arabella Figg overcomes her fears to befriend a werewolf and watch him fall in love, if only from afar.

I've been thinking a lot about women in supporting roles in RL lately, and this fic was an exercise in taking a minor character and her contributions seriously. Arabella is an elderly Squib, peripheral in canon, and only partially aware of the Remus/Sirius romance blossoming in this fic as she slowly befriends Remus. I think inadvertently this fic became a backhanded commentary on the (often supporting) role of women in slash, in which I was bidding for the reader's affections with Arabella while doing the minimum on the Remus/Sirius front. My compromise involved trying to remember that slash (and gay men's culture more generally) isn't necessarily so exclusively male as we sometimes make it out to be and developing a polite but genuine friendship between Remus and Arabella.

5. Bellatrix Black Lestrange in Fumbling, Stopping, and Starting, a remix of this fic by sambethe. Bellatrix doesn't get that much screen time here, but we see her twice, once as a young women, at odds with Andromeda over her impending marriage to a Muggle-born, and again in the afterlife, when she and Andromeda reconcile.

Bellatrix's defining characteristic here is her cruelty; she's a touch too mean in her dealings with her family, and even after death she's hard to take. I see her as quite similar to Sirius in many ways--ideological, aggressive, judgmental, and cutting. This doesn't really come across in the story, but I'm interested in the way that these qualities are admirable in one character/gender and frightening in another. I realize the main reason Sirius is admirable is that he's made some good choices and Bellatrix is frightening because of her devotion to the wrong set of ideas, but surely there's an odd gender dynamic at play here. Just a bit?

Well, that makes everything sound very didactic, doesn't it? *sigh* It wasn't meant to be. As always, I'm interested in your thoughts on these subjects.

Also, I'm collecting memes again, both five favorite fics and five fics with women. If you did one for your own writing, please comment and let me know?

Five favorite fics:
schemingreader, inksheddings, busaikko, liseuse, such_heights, bronze_ribbons, paulamcg, mauvaise_etoile, lupinslittlesis, minnow_53

Five fics with women and girls:
shaggydogstail, snegurochka_lee, bronze_ribbons, a_t_rain, snorkackcatcher, krabapple, nimbus1944