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honestly you all are so annoying because motherhood IS interesting but fandom people are simultaneously obsessed with deciding that every woman has motherly qualities and completely disinterested in actually exploring motherhood as a role that informs a character. I do think exploring a character being a mother can be wildly interesting if they are canonically one, but because of misogyny, people just view motherhood as a totally unremarkable naturalized state that all women must inhabit!
I've reblogged this before as-is, but have been thinking about it more lately due to my attempts to conceive ... Actually, to me fandom on Tumblr seems singularly obsessed with declaring that no female characters that are remotely interesting would be mothers, to the point that I only tend to see anything about ships having kids very rarely and when I do, nearly always it's from m/m perspectives (sometimes in fantasy contexts, sometimes just "this is what I want so it happens"). It seems to have become law that women who are at all driven or tough or smart Wouldn't Do That, which on the one hand gets around the sexist idea that every woman MUST want to have kids while on the other being sexist in that motherhood can never be explored in fandom, as exploring it is inherently suspicious.
I think some of how this point (which I very much agree with) manifests in fandom is that parenting is seen as both 1) a thing women can lose and 2) a detriment to women while being 1) a thing men can gain and 2) a positive to men.
For the first part, I think of fics about characters like Black Widow from Marvel, where maybe she had gotten pregnant while in the Red Room and lost the child, and/or she had been forcibly sterilized by the Red Room, but either way, she "no longer can be a mother" even though m/m couples will be shown as becoming parents in all sorts of ways that don't involve having a uterus. Alternatively, a woman will present her dark past as precluding her from ever raising a child--while a comparable past does no such thing to male characters. Alternatively, female characters will talk about motherhood as a detriment, something that would get in the way of their lifestyle. They're girlbossing too much to want to be a mother, and they're not interested in something that would "soften" them in the way that motherhood ostensibly would.
They may take care of a child, but ultimately they don't keep that child, because they're just not mother material.
For male characters, we will often see them becoming parents by surprise--they stumble on a baby, their mission/adventure/quest suddenly involves a kid they need to protect, their sibling or friend will die and they will have to take care of their child, and suddenly they're a parent out of nowhere. Rather than losing the ability to be a parent, they gain it, often without expecting to. This is almost universally shown as a positive for the male character--maybe it's tricky at first, but they connect with the kid, feel feelings they didn't expect to feel, and ultimately thrive at fathering, usually with a male character or two by their side.
Sometimes a female character chips in on that parenting, but it will often be more as the aunt-type relationship, one who can hang with the kid for a bit and then give them back to their true parent.
The female characters who already have kids tend to be more sidelined characters--the healers, the nurturers, baking a pie and being a homemaker and protecting their kids but not being The Interesting Women.
The Red Pen of Love: Advice From Post-Acceptance Edits
Writing is deeply personal. It’s hard to do, and it’s harder still to put those words out into the world. You want someone to read them! You’re terrified someone will read them! So it’s thrilling when an editor says they love those words enough to publish them. But wait, now they want to change them?
It’s no wonder authors bristle at the thought of post-acceptance edits. If it’s good enough to get published, why fix what ain’t broken? But editor Atlin Merrick of Improbable Press gave me some sage advice: an editor loves your work or they wouldn’t have accepted it. They don’t want to butcher it. They want to make it shine. So don’t lose heart when you see your story marked up by that dreaded red pen. In post-acceptance edits, that red ink stands for love.
The small stuff
We think of grammar as immutable, right and wrong, but the truth is many editors have personal preferences. As an example: We think of grammar as immutable—right and wrong! But the truth is, many editors have preferences. Same sentence, different punctuation, a deleted word. Which is better? Which is “right”? Nobody knows!
My advice with tiny edits like this is to let them lie. The meaning of the sentence has not changed, and I personally do not care where an editor wants a comma. And do remember these edits are almost always for style. Your editor does not think you don’t know where commas go. Promise.
The big stuff
Your editor reads a lot of work, and when they were reading yours, they were thinking, Oh, I love this. Oh, what a beautiful phrase. But they were also thinking, That paragraph really starts two sentences in, and This one line doesn’t really fit the tone.
(They were NOT thinking, This is the worst paragraph I’ve ever read, why does this person even think they can write?! That’s your anxiety talking.)
Your editor is just doing their job, and it’s the same job you’ve done with this piece, over countless revisions and drafts. Most of the time, they’ll be right. That paragraph is much more elegant without those first two sentences. That one line is jarring and should be reworded. Just remember, this isn’t a tear-down. It’s a tune-up. At the end, your piece will shine its brightest.
The hard stuff
A few years back, I sold a story to the anthology Clamour and Mischief from Clan Destine Press. The editor was fabulous and edits progressed easily, until we got to this sentence: “But now that Branwen had seen what the palace of the Sun was really like, she recalled the tales of the Moon with an uneasy nostalgia.”
Now, I was thinking uneasy nostalgia was the perfect way to express the character’s mixed feelings about visiting a place from a beloved childhood story but suspecting it was going to be terrifying. But the editor was thinking uneasy nostalgia didn’t really make sense. Objectively, she was probably right. But I had an emotional attachment to those two words. So I contested the edit.
If you’re going to contest, remember, you’re not defending your precious writing from the big mean red pen. You’re working with your editor. So I politely explained that yes, the phrase was weird, but I wanted it to be weird, and I’d really like to leave it in. The editor wrote back and basically said Eh, it’s two words, who cares, leave it. Success!
The unexpected stuff
I once wrote a story about a man holing up in a drafty cabin during a blizzard with a weak wood fire that burned down to coals. My editor kindly pointed out that wood fires do not have coals. That’s probably my favorite edit ever.
Then there’s the stuff that’s really out of left field. I’m always careful to hit the suggested word count for a submission call, so I was surprised when after an acceptance to an anthology, the editors offered me 2000 words to write an expanded ending, and could they please have it in 10 days? (Boy, did I feel like a professional writer getting that done in 10 days!) So it’s good to expect the unexpected in the editing phase.
The bottom line
It can dampen the thrill of acceptance when you find out your editor’s been at it with their red pen. But it’s never the case that the editor thinks badly of you, your writing, or your story. Your editor is the fan standing half a mile before the finish line of the race, handing you that cup of water that makes all the difference. They already think you’re a winner. Let them help you prove it.
This article originally appeared in Freelance Magazine from the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.
DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ The Vampire Haven erotic romance series ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers
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avoidance is lowkey funny because it’s like i don’t want love on the off chance that it gets taken away from me and then i have to become john wick or something
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