Vows and Watersheds, Book Three of The Shattered Moon, is now available for pre-order at all the usual places, and direct from me, and just a few days away from publication (the 8th of February).
Without giving any major spoilers, I’ll say this. Three Kinds of North and The Sundering Wall both feature the same two point of view (POV) characters, Jerya and Rodal. Jerya is still central in Vows and Watersheds, but there’s a new character to share POV duties. After their first meeting Jerya’s life begins to take a new direction… and that’s all I’m saying here.
Three Kinds of North and The Sundering Wall were originally conceived and written as one long book (about 140,000 words in the last draft). There’s more about the development of the story on my blog. I originally envisaged that it would be as much Rodal’s story as Jerya’s. Perhaps, if you’ve read both books, you’ll think that it is; but there’s a valedictory quality to the last chapter of The Sundering Wall. Remember the final line?
"Then he picked up his near-empty pack, swinging it lightly onto his shoulder even as he turned away, and stepped out between the trees into the rain."
That’s not quite the last we’ll see of Rodal (oops, spoiler!), but he won’t return as a POV character, and in Book Four, The Skilthorn Congress, he’s off-stage throughout. In fact this book will have twice as many POV characters, but Jerya will still be central. She’s the common element, and in my mind at least she’s the heart of the series—and is likely to remain so as long as it goes on.
What may be less obvious is that I didn’t exactly plan it this way.
Now’s a good moment to trot out one of my favourite quotes from my favourite writer:
"People like to believe that writers know exactly what they are doing and have their story under control, thought out, plotted from beginning to end. It makes sense of the whole strange enterprise of novel writing, makes it rational. Many academics believe this, so do many readers, so do some writers. But not all writers have this kind of control over their material, and I wouldn’t even want to have it."
—Ursula K Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea, Introduction.
As Le Guin goes on to say, forgoing this kind of rigid control does not mean forsaking responsibility for what you write. This strikes me as a profound distinction. I may not feel I have total control over Jerya; I didn’t start by creating a character file or whatever it is that those strange people called plotters do; I certainly don’t feel that I abracadabra’d her into existence with a wave of my writerly wand. And yet I have to take responsibility for her, and I have to take responsibility for the fact that the central character of the series that I’ve been gestating for decades and working on intensively for the last two, has a biography very different from my own.
I guess what will strike most readers first is that she’s female and I’m not; and this is indeed what I mostly want to address here. But let’s not overlook the fact that at the start of Three Kinds of North she’s nineteen, which I am also not, by quite a few decades. Of course, I have been nineteen, but I’ve never been female.
The differences don’t end there. Jerya is also what we now call a person of colour. I’m not going to dwell on this, except to say that in the world of The Shattered Moon, skin-colour does not carry the accretion of significance that it too often does in our world. (Referring back to Earthsea again; Le Guin’s main character, Ged, is male, and brown-skinned. In fact, as she makes clear, the people of the Archipelago are pretty well all brown. She was often exercised by the insistence of publishers and their cover designers on rendering Ged as white.)
But let’s focus on gender. Is it more or less problematic for a woman to write a male protagonist than for a man to write a female one? Is it problematic at all? Some might say so, I guess.
The question was recently asked in a writers’ discussion group on Mastodon (Twitter for conscientious objectors): "How do you feel about writing outside your gender/sexuality/race?" The overwhelming response was that it was OK as long as it was done sensitively and with empathy. Of course we were treated to a few examples of Men Writing Terribly About Women, although "She breasted boobily to the stairs and titted down them" has to be a spoof… doesn’t it? As several people said, bad representation is worse than no representation.
Anyway, I think the best response came from the excellent Charles Stross: "Flip the question: how would you feel about a writer who ONLY ever wrote inside their gender/sexuality/race?"
And where would you draw the lines anyway? Gender, sexuality, and race are none of them clear-cut impermeable categories.
The point I’m really chasing here goes back to Le Guin’s observation about control vs responsibility. I never made a conscious decision to write a book, let alone a series, that centred on a female character. It hardly feels as if I had a choice. I might have intended for Jerya and Rodal to share the limelight equally, but it wasn’t long before she was telling me, in that decided way she has, "This is my story."
And why not? I may not have first-hand experience of everything that she does, but that’s always going to be the case unless you’re writing autobiography dressed up as fiction. It’s especially true if you’re writing science fiction, fantasy, or historical fiction—or even something like The Shattered Moon series, which seems to exist at some weird interface of all three.
I do relate deeply to many of her experiences, from solitary wanderings on the moors and in the forest at the opening of Three Kinds of North to the excitement of learning. There’s a specific moment early in Vows and Watersheds where she gazes through at telescope at what we call the Orion Nebula (something I wish I’d done more of IRL). This is also a significant moment of bonding between her and New POV Character, by the way.
In staking her claim to centrality in the series, Jerya is not without precedent in other things I’ve written. I have a good draft of a portal fantasy which also centres a female character. (It’s not likely to see the light of day any time soon.) And that’s not the only example.
If my readiness to embrace a female POV has an identifiable origin, it probably lies in my history as a reader. My 'Desert Island Dozen' of all-time favourite novels not only included two by Ursula K Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness and Malafrena), but five more by female writers: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson; The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers; Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers; Middlemarch by George Eliot; and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
That same list also included The Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. I said a good deal about Ransome in my previous post; here I’ll just pick up on what I said about his treatment of female characters, and most particularly the fact that I was drawn to the female lead, Nancy Blackett, more than to John or Roger. (I first read Swallows and Amazons when I was about nine.)
In fact, for those who know the series, my favourite male character is Dick, introduced in Winter Holiday. And (small plug) readers of Vows and Watersheds will find a fairly clear tribute to Dick in one of the characters there. But Dick’s a sideshow here.
Even Nancy wasn’t the first female character I identified with: George in The Famous Five came earlier, and there have been many others since. I've never felt constrained by a character's gender, and certainly never limited myself to 'boys' books'. Favourite characters range from Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird to Dorothea in Middlemarch, plus dozens of others. There’s another Dorothea in several of Ransome’s books, starting with Winter Holiday and, in a quiet way (quite unlike Nancy) she is another great character. I’ve also mentioned before how my conception of gender was recalibrated by The Left Hand of Darkness—but that's another story.
There’s no particular virtue in this; it’s just how it is. I was one of those kids who read pretty much whatever was in front of me, including the back of the cornflakes packet, and many of the books I read arrived in fairly random ways. My Dad was a vicar until I was eleven and I think my parents used to pick up stuff left unsold at the end of church jumble sales. There were plenty of hoary old adventure books, no doubt intended for boys; I remember The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau, for example, in what might well have been quite early editions. (I’d be surprised if Philip Pullman's The Tin Princess wasn’t at least partly conceived in homage to these: Razkavia as a version of Ruritania.)
Sometimes I didn’t even realise that I was reading work by women. Andre Norton was one of my favourites in the Junior Library in Altrincham, but I only realised much later that she was female—not that it would have mattered; I was equally eagerly reading Rosemary Sutcliff's historical adventures, Little Women, and many more.
The same applies, slightly later, to D.C.Fontana, a story-editor and writer on the Original Series of Star Trek. 'D' stands for Dorothy, but I didn’t realise that for many years. The Wikipedia entry notes: "(Leonard) Nimoy… felt that unusually among Star Trek's writers, Fontana was able to write believable female characters who were fully developed in the screenplay." As this implies, though ahead of its time in many ways, the Original Series did frequently falter in its depiction of female characters.
You get the picture. My reading has always been voracious and eclectic and nothing ever flicked that switch that supposedly resides in the male brain that turns you away from 'girls' books'—and sometimes away from reading altogether (shudder). It’s true that my special fondness for science fiction did take me into an area that was rather male-dominated, so I give thanks that I found Le Guin as early as I did, and soon enough picked up on other trail-blazing females, like Joanna Russ, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Anne McCaffrey, who once commented, "I was so tired of all the weak women screaming in the corner while their boyfriends were beating off the aliens."
I also encountered major feminist classics when I switched from Geography to Social and Political Sciences for the second half of my degree: The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, The Female Eunuch, and so on. On the whole, though, I’m sure I’ve learned more from novels than from academic texts and polemics; and I think I could make a case for science fiction at least having the potential to open the reader’s mind to new possibilities and new ways of thinking about how the world might be. (Which is why I’m perennially disappointed when SF, especially in movies, defaults back to Just Another Monster Story. Alien and its sequels may have a terrific female lead, but in other respects they’re just Beowulf with rockets and big guns.)
And where does all this get us? I write, sometimes, from the POV of female characters. And I feel, with a character like Jerya, very strong identification with her. Is this a response, as I may have suggested, to my life’s reading? Does it also owe something to some of the female role models in my life? Am I working through some unresolved gender issues of my own? And if so, are they issues with maleness itself, or merely with masculinity? Cards on the table, I am absolutely clear that I have problems with typical traditional models of masculinity. I’m appalled by the whole incel narrative, and if they want to say I’m not a real man, I’ll say "thanks for the compliment".
In the end I keep coming back to that question posed by Charles Stross: "how would you feel about a writer who ONLY ever wrote inside their gender?" 'Seriously concerned’ would probably be my answer. It would be a sad world if we couldn’t at least try to put ourselves in others’ shoes. Fiction-writing, for me, is not disguised autobiography; it’s about discovering other lives. Lives that I might have lived, perhaps. Reincarnation by imagination?
The question I see is not whether it should be done, but whether it’s done well. I do the best I can—as Le Guin says, I take responsibility. But in the end it’s up to the reader to say how well (or not) I’ve done it.
