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Clarkesworld Magazine has published Part Two of its Epic Fantasy Roundtable. This is an impressively massive undertaking by Jeremy L.C. Jones, and I want to again give special attention to the fact that the roundtable includes one agent, one editor, and 26 writers of whom half are female and half male (2 that I know of are PoC).
In the July Part One to be found here, Jones asked all the writers why they wrote epic fantasy. My answer wasn't included in that part because, as it turned out, it was used in Part Two.
I want to highlight part of my answer here, and talk a little more about what I said and what it means for how I write, in light of an email conversation I have been having recently with writer Michelle Sagara West![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
msagara.
I said:
I was an outdoor, athletic child: I preferred to play physically active imagination games outdoors. But, against that, the cultural norms of the day reminded me constantly that the things I loved to do were appropriate for boys, not for girls. People forget this. So in the beginning, as it were, fantasy novels were a way for me to escape the rigid constraints put on girls. More importantly, I could write my own stories and build my own worlds. If you've not grown up being told you shouldn't be who you are, I'm not sure you can quite understand why world-building and writing epic fantasy is so attractive and in its way a form of chain-breaking. But it was, and it is.
Long ago I made a kind of intrinsic promise to my 16 year old self that I would never betray her by leaving her out of the stories I was then beginning to write and that she loved. By which I hasten to add that I do not mean that I write stories with myself as a thinly disguised version of a main character. What I meant then and mean now is that I would never neglect or diminish or elide the female perspective in my books. That I would not bow to the idea, prevalent far more then than now, that there were proper and "natural" stories for girls and women to enjoy, but that male focused stories and perspectives were more naturally Worthy and Important. And that girls and women didn't belong there (except possibly as props or as rewards for the men).
I have to be honest. I think epic fantasy is still by and large written with a male gaze. With a few notable exceptions, unexpected amounts of it still don't do a particularly good job passing the Bechdel Test despite the historical evidence that women lived during the past.
I'm thrilled by the explosion of popularity of genres like urban fantasy, paranormal, Young Adult, and romantic fantasy (and the huge numbers of readers who crossover from the unfairly maligned romance genre to read widely throughout other genres), because they are all great genres for the female perspective--and the male as well.
But epic fantasy is the genre of my heart.
I write epic fantasy the way I do because I remember being that 16 year old girl who almost never saw people like her in the stories she wanted to read and thereby experience.
In the July Part One to be found here, Jones asked all the writers why they wrote epic fantasy. My answer wasn't included in that part because, as it turned out, it was used in Part Two.
I want to highlight part of my answer here, and talk a little more about what I said and what it means for how I write, in light of an email conversation I have been having recently with writer Michelle Sagara West
msagara.I said:
I was an outdoor, athletic child: I preferred to play physically active imagination games outdoors. But, against that, the cultural norms of the day reminded me constantly that the things I loved to do were appropriate for boys, not for girls. People forget this. So in the beginning, as it were, fantasy novels were a way for me to escape the rigid constraints put on girls. More importantly, I could write my own stories and build my own worlds. If you've not grown up being told you shouldn't be who you are, I'm not sure you can quite understand why world-building and writing epic fantasy is so attractive and in its way a form of chain-breaking. But it was, and it is.
Long ago I made a kind of intrinsic promise to my 16 year old self that I would never betray her by leaving her out of the stories I was then beginning to write and that she loved. By which I hasten to add that I do not mean that I write stories with myself as a thinly disguised version of a main character. What I meant then and mean now is that I would never neglect or diminish or elide the female perspective in my books. That I would not bow to the idea, prevalent far more then than now, that there were proper and "natural" stories for girls and women to enjoy, but that male focused stories and perspectives were more naturally Worthy and Important. And that girls and women didn't belong there (except possibly as props or as rewards for the men).
I have to be honest. I think epic fantasy is still by and large written with a male gaze. With a few notable exceptions, unexpected amounts of it still don't do a particularly good job passing the Bechdel Test despite the historical evidence that women lived during the past.
I'm thrilled by the explosion of popularity of genres like urban fantasy, paranormal, Young Adult, and romantic fantasy (and the huge numbers of readers who crossover from the unfairly maligned romance genre to read widely throughout other genres), because they are all great genres for the female perspective--and the male as well.
But epic fantasy is the genre of my heart.
I write epic fantasy the way I do because I remember being that 16 year old girl who almost never saw people like her in the stories she wanted to read and thereby experience.