Meredith Mansfield, Author

This topic arises as I finally begin to make headway on the new version of SEVEN STARS.  I wouldn’t say I’m on a first-draft-in-six-weeks pace (which can be quite a wild ride anyway), but I am definitely making strong and consistent progress.

I’ve been somewhat resistant to writing this story. Not because I don’t like it, but because the first version of it fought me to a standstill at 50,000 words and refused to go any farther.

I set it aside and began tinkering with the plot to try to get my interest back up. But even though I liked the new plot line much better, I couldn’t flog myself into getting back into the story. Until I completely reimagined it.

In this case, I played with the gender of the main characters. Actually, I flipped them. The formerly male character is now female and the formerly female character is now male, which basically forced me to look at the entire story with completely new eyes. It’s too soon (chapter four) to tell whether this is going to work all the way through to the end, but either way it’s going to have been an interesting exercise and a useful way of getting back into a story I had some resistance to.

You can’t just change the genders of the characters and then go ahead and write the same story. Some other things will have to change. Even if your characters still have the same personalities and the same goals as before. The way other characters respond to them and their expectations of them will probably change. Even if they have the same goals, the way they go about trying to achieve them, at least for the first try/fail cycle, will probably change. The way they respond to challenges may change–and the skill set they bring to the problem.

Of course, since I write fantasy, I have the advantage of being able to adjust the world I set these characters in, too. But, in some ways, it’s more interesting to play with them in the original world, created for a character of the opposite gender, and see how it changes their responses.

Look at s couple of examples in the genre:

In THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Eowyn had essentially the same desires as her brother Eomer, and every bit as much courage, but she was constrained by her gender role.

In GRACELING, Katsa is faced with contradictory expectations. On the one hand, her uncle the king tries to treat her like any other lady of the court and marry her off to his advantage. All the while, he’s using her Graced talents to make her his strong arm and assassin.

Both characters who at some point have to break out of their assigned roles. I think that makes them more interesting. And I think it will make SEVEN STARS much more fun to play with, now.