Feminism in YA – RT Convention 2011

Panelists (from top left): Margaret Stohl, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Clare B. Dunkle, Holly Black

Four bestselling YA authors discuss writing strong women. and the evolution of female protagonists in YA. Moderated by Melissa Marr.

Melissa Marr: I’m going to put Clare on the spot, here, and say – Clare was doing this before a lot of us, and so can you talk about how the market has shifted, in terms of your reception, as writing strong female protagonists, then and now? Are you feeling a difference? And how does that work when you’re one of the people who started the ball rolling and led a lot of us to do it?

Clare B. Dunkle: Oh gosh, that does put me on the spot. It is true that the market has changed considerably since this book was sold in 2001. Back then it was really exciting for Holt to be releasing a fantasy of any sort. It was the first year that Holt had come back to fantasy since the Lloyd Alexander Prydaim series, in the ’60s. So the idea – it’s not really that Holt hadn’t been releasing smart, strong women; they hadn’t been releasing smart, strong women who did magic. And there was very much this idea that the smart strong women were in the realistic fiction stories, they were dealing with problems – their mothers were committing suicide, things like that – and then there was this sub-sub-sub-basement genre of fantasy, where the editors and the agents and the critics didn’t care about it, and bad thing supposedly happened, and nobody looked to fantasy to be critically acceptable or acclaimed. So that’s really changed.

Melissa Marr: And Holly, your Title and Valiant were around the same general time – and you certainly are tackling some serious issues in there.

Holly Black: Did The Hollow Kingdom come out in 2002?

Clare B. Dunkle: No, it came out in ’03.

Holly Black: I also sold in 2001, and it came out it in 2002. So almost exactly – wow, we were really close, that’s really very close. It was a different genre. I mean, there were examples of  fantasy, with girls – it was all high fantasy, it was Tammy Pierce, Garth Nix had had Gabriel out at that time. Those are the books that I read when my friend was like,  I think that you’re writing urban fantasy here, for teens. I think teenagers like this kind- they’re reading these books. And my memory of what YA was, was so different from that, it was so much younger, and reading those books I thought wow – these really have some stuff going on. But I think that the combination of realistic and fantasy was completely weird to them. They were like what is this urban fantasy stuff? What is this? And also though, I mean, YA was just so totally different – people did not have the expectations that you would have a lot of readers. I remember, I went to a SCBWI – Society of Children’s Book Writer’s and Illustrators – and they were trying to get people to network in the bathroom. And so I was in line in the bathroom and someone turned  to me and said, what do you write? I said young adult. And they turned around and talked to the person in front of them. That was the perception of YA back then. Back then, back in those days…

Melissa Marr: So the question is, then, why did you, and why did those of you more recently, why did you decide that this is the sort of character you want to write? You are all writing very strong female protagonists, where did that come from and why this genre, specifically?

Margaret Stohl: Really Kami and I wrote what we wrote because we read fantasy and grew up reading fantasy-fantasy, and then my teenagers, and young teenager sister, said specifically: we want this. So we really didn’t set out to write, initially, the personal tale we wanted to tell, we set out to write the personal tale they wanted to hear. My daughters are competitive on a international level, fencing – they are armed and dangerous. And they are the strongest women I know, of all women – any kind of courage I have, I extrapolate backwards from the fact that I must be brave because they are brave, and genetically we are related, so that must be in me somewhere – but that’s about all I’ve got. So they said, why is the girl not ever powerful? I want the girl to be magical, I want her to have powers; I don’t want her to just follow the boy around. I don’t need to do that. And we really responded to that question – so in a way, the non-girl-power aspect is that the boy tells our story. So we gave the voice to the boy – they asked for that too, because they said we didn’t want the girl to be whining, which was the books they were reading – not your books – but the books they were reading at the time. So they asked for a not whining girl, a girl with magic and power, and that’s an interesting thing – the literalization of power, that you can have a strong girl who has magic power, is itself maybe a more dangerous thing than just a strong girl who is a victim of a sad realistic situation. And they asked for not a generic setting – they wanted a specific setting, we set it in the South, the most specific place we knew. I think there were a couple of other things, but that was basically- oh, and they said no vampires, because they were saturated. And that was it. So it was specifically a story written for strong girls.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes: I wrote my first book when I was still a teenager myself. So I was 19 when I wrote Golden, it was my freshman year of college – and college was this wonderful thing, where I had so many friends and they were all girls, for the first time in my life. All my college friends freshmen year were girls. So I was surrounded by really smart, really strong, really diverse – I had six roommates, I don’t know how six people can all be polar opposites, without any of them being the same, but somehow that happened. And I think when you’re surrounded by smart, strong, funny, wonderful teenager girls and that’s sort of the story you want to write – it never would have occurred to me to write anything else, because it was what I was living. I mean, obviously the magical aspects of things was not what I was living. When I was writing – I was always writing – and the roommates would end up reading the stuff, and it was just sort of-  I try to imagine, what do books look like if you’re writing and it’s not the strong female characters, and I don’t really know how someone can go about doing that. So it was just kind of the natural extension of the life I was living at the time.

Holly Black: I was just thinking about Margie and I writing- The Curse Workers books are told from a boy’s point of view; Beautiful Creatures and Beautiful Darkness are told from a boy’s point of view. When I was first writing Tithe and Valiant and those books, the girl was the protagonist, and she was entering this magical world, and the guy was always – there’s always the Other myth, to the opposite person in a romance. And one of the things that I was really interested in, in the Curse Workers book, and one of the things I’ve always been interested in, in Beautiful Creatures – is that by switching who has the magic, and switching who’s the protagonist, the woman gets to have the adversary’s Other figure – it’s a great ambiguity. It really changes, both the dynamics of how you- but also it actually makes you see how Other boys often are in books. And how difficult it is to take those markers and give them to a girl.

Clare B. Dunkle: When I wrote my first book, they were also for my daughters, who are very, very strong – they’re now 22 and 24. At the time we had moved to Germany, and they were in – by choice, by their choice – in a German boarding school; 120 girls who didn’t speak their language, and they were kicking butt. They’re just, they are fantastic young women. They had read through everything they could get their hands on, and wanted more, and I began writing for them. I would send them a chapter a week – I had no idea that these chapters would eventually be published. I wasn’t writing for publication, I was writing for my girls. And my girls would not ever- it would never even dawn on me to try to present them with a heroine who did not have a strength of some sort. Although there are different kinds of strength.

Melissa Marr: My next question. We can go there immediately. We can go there – that’s my next question.

Clare B. Dunkle: There are certain kinds of strength that are very acceptable to Americans; certain kinds of strong women that are more acceptable. I think we tend to accept The Fighter, The Rebel, the one who is bringing about change. That resonates with us, it resonates with who we think we are, and so we readily identify a heroine like that as strong. I was dealing with a theme that has fascinated me since early childhood – about the age of 8 or 9, my mother let me read completely inappropriate literature. Her whole library was open to me and she was a college professor, and so I was reading primary source materials about Viking human sacrifices and things like that when I was 8 or 9.  I was reading Ovid, I was reading the real myths – not the watered down for kids myths – and I was wrestling with these ideas, things like we were talking about last night, how if he’s such a great guy, why does he keep raping women (one of the things with the Greek myths – if you read the real things, what the heck). Reading about the Vikings I would think, what would it be like to be snatched away from your culture, see your entire family destroyed, and then spend the next 40 years in this culture that destoyed your home. How would that feel, how would that work? I would walk to school in 3rd graade thinking, what would I do? Would I rebel for 40 years, or would I find a way to be successful in that new culture?

From the audience: What did you decide?

Clare B. Dunkle: Well, the thing I love about questions like that is that they have no final answer – which is why I write YA. I don’t ever want to write a book that says this is what the final answer is. I only write a book because it has a question that so fascinates me that I can say, on this day, with these characters, in this situation, it turned out like this. But since my daughters were now dealing with an alien culture that they were immersed in, in The Hollow Kingdom I wrote about that kind of abduction into another culture. And I have had- you know, there are readers who come to this and say, these are not strong women because they don’t- some of them wind up adopting and being successful in their new culture. And that’s not American, dangit. But it wasn’t really written – it was written out of that experience, of trying to find some middle ground. It’s all about prejudice, really.

Melissa Marr: So Marg, how would you define strong, kick-ass women?

Margaret Stohl: Well, I- You look like you had a thought, Jen. Because I saw you gearing up over there-

Jennifer Lynn Barnes: I was just going to say that, my first books were very much shelved as sort of chick lit, and now I’m writing slightly darker books. And to me, all of the characters are equally strong women in different ways – but the reader reaction is so different. In the darker books, with the girl who is physically strong and can be really put through the ringer, people are like, oh this is such a strong female character – she’s so strong, and it’s so feminist. But the book that I considered to be my most feminist book, the one that’s sort of like my manifesto on being a strong woman – the theme of which was, basically, that there’s no right way to be a strong woman; that there are just as many ways to be a strong women as there are to be a strong man. And it was a book –  hot pink cover – it was about a group of teenage spies whose cover was that they were a varsity cheerleading squad. So it’s like half Bring it On, half Charlie’s Angels, and the reason that cheerleaders can be the super spies is that you put a girl in a cheerleading skirt and all of a sudden people assume that she’s stupid, that she doesn’t care about anything other than sort of the surface, shallow things. And so the reason it works, they play to the stereotype, because that’s how they get in places without people caring, that’s how they fly below the radar. And that was their cover. And in the book, the main character had all the same preconceptions about cheerleaders and about that certain kind of girl – about the idea that being girly means you’re not strong, or that liking certain things means that you’re somehow less, you know- My character wore combat boots and was kind of a loner and everything, and she goes into the book thinking that she’s better than these other girls, because she’s strong, she’s tough, she doesn’t take crap from anyone, and they’re running around in their little skirts at halftime. And the whole book is just her sort of discovering over and over again –  even when she knows that it’s not what it appears, she still falls into the same trap that allows the squad to work. And I was a cheerleader myself, and I am not a physically strong person – I often joke that it’s really dangerous for me when I’m writing Brynn in Raised by Wolves, because she can so kick ass physically and I can not kick physical ass. And I live in New Haven, Connecticut, in which there is sometimes crime on the streets near my apartment – and I’m not allowed to go outside after I’ve been writing because, I write first person and I get into it, so I’m like, I could so take you – then I’m like holy crap, I can’t take anyone! This is such a bad idea – because that’s not the kind of strong woman I am, I have different strengths that are perhaps not, you know, about me taking the mugger outside my apartment. So that’s really what I feel very strongly about –  there are some readers – but I’ve had many, many more readers look at Raised by Wolves, about the tough girl who gets beaten down and comes back up and is physically tough and takes on people – and been like, oh that –  that is what a strong women looks like. And I want to be like, well, yes, that’s one way that a strong women can look – but you can be just as strong wearing a cheerleading skirt, or liking shopping, or doing all of these things. And I feel like there’s – especially coming from the tradition of writing chick lit – there is a degree to which people assume that girly is stupid, and that to be a strong woman in some way you’re supposed to be less girly. Which is this really weird idea out there, that you need to do that, so.

Margaret Stohl: That’s interesting- and I deal with this in a household that feels more like a country of women. We’re like an Amazon family – huge. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am roughtly three Kami’s tall, as are my children. And I’m the weakest person in the house – I’m a little bit less strong than my 10 year old daughter, and my big girls can really kick ass, like literal physical ass. So here’s the thing that I’ve found – and not to be the downer in the room, but I feel like I am the downer in the room, so let me be the downer. Sometimes I’m frustrated because I don’t think we’re doing as well as we could be doing. And maybe it’s always that way, but I worked on something once – just a passion project, and I don’t know if it will ever see the light of day – that was about fencing and my daughters. And it was so interesting, because I would show parts of it to my friends or different people and they’d be like, yeah, but that girl’s not appealing, because she has big muscles in her legs and that’s not pretty. And she talks about how strong she is, and that’s weird. And she’s not like- girls need to be – girls in our own books – need to be skinny. That’s just a fact. Girls in our own books, in this empowered room, need to be skinny; they need to have long hair or be pretty, and you can’t have a girl who looks like what you look like if you can kick ass, usually. And that was disappointing to me. And then also I write stories for my 10 year old, and we were writing a story about video games (my family makes video games), and my daughter said, we should write one about me, but she would have to be a boy. Because there are no girls like me. For me to be what I’m most like, I need to be a boy – like I’m a boy character. Girls don’t do what I do and they’re not like me. And that was another thing. And then the third negative thing I’d throw out, because I’m Debbie Downer here – is that I work with a group of women – Kami and I do – called Write Girl in LA, which is awesome, my favorite non-profit in the world, that helps less resourced girls with creative writing. And they have this open mic rant – and one of them just came up and they just started ripping on a YA author I know – a very successful YA author – saying, girlfriend, he’s hot and he’s hot, but what’s up with the self esteem of the girls in your books? She was like, you have problems! I’m just saying, when are we going to get the girl that does this and this – and they’re talking about now, books that are on the shelves now, book that we – not us, but our genre – write. And so I was sitting at a table with writers who were all like, holy crap, is that my book? Are we doing that?

From the audience: I have a question in relation to that – so as a YA writer, if you want to write strong women, do you think that part of the responsibility is the way that those women in the books relate to the boys in the books?

Melissa Marr: That’s the next question.

Margaret Stohl: So I’m not really answering the question what does strength look like – then I read an article yesterday that said we’ve co-opted – to create strong women we write violent women, and that’s a male understanding of what strength is, so we’ve really been co-opted into a different understanding of strength.

Melissa Marr: That is definitely one theory, but when you’re looking at the exact sort of character that Jennifer is writing, we aren’t all co-opted in that way. And I think Holly has characters, when we’re talking about the physical appearance, Val for instance certainly proves some of that wrong, as does Cashore’s Graceling. I mean, we are still getting some of that.

Holly Black:  I was going to say actually that I think that strength in books for girls is- I think what’s really important is giving them their own story. That the story isn’t a love story, it’s their story, and that they have a separate story. As somebody else once said, maybe it doesn’t start to be- but one of the things that I really loved for girls is to have the ability to make mistakes and make bad choices and be bad. That I think that one of the ways that we don’t let girls be strong, is we don’t let girls be be wicked in certain ways, and we don’t let girls be selfish and we don’t let girls- that in fact rather than being virtuous what I really love in books and where I really see the strength in girls – the kind of girls I want to write, I want to write girl who act- who have a range of emotions and who are not perfect, and who are- and I think we have a real difficulty not criticising the behavior of women to such an extent that they’re not allowed to be miserable. And so that is where I’m always coming to, when I’m trying to write women – not, whether they kick ass physically, or whether they are smart or clever, what I want them actually to have at their very core is to be human and fallible.

Melissa Marr: Can you talk a little bit about both Val and Lila? For readers that don’t know them – Val is in Holly’s fairy series, and Lila is in Curse Workers. For those who don’t know them-

Holly Black: Val, in Valiant, is a girl, she runs away from home, she winds up living on the streets, in the subway tunnels in New York City, and falling in with a bunch of kids who are the human servants of fairies, who need a particular magical potion to survive in a city that’s so full of iron. And the kids wind up taking the drugs themselves, which winds up- it makes them be able to glamour people and it’s somewhat addictive. And so she goes through this journey of trying to figure out- how she fits herself. She comes into it kind of thinking of herself as – she’s a lacrosse player, so she’s actually quite strong – but she’s kind of a sidekick into her own life, and she comes to be front and center, in a magical world, and as someone dealing with an addiction.

Melissa Marr: And also in Curse Workers you have a somewhat non-traditional wild female.

Holly Black: She’s a mobster’s daughter, she’s going to be a mob boss someday – she’s a sinister girl. That was, it was so fun to actually say, I’m going to write from the boy’s point of view and I’m going to make this girl completely mysterious and possibly lethal. And he’s not going to have any idea what’s going on inside her head.

Margaret Stohl: We got in so much trouble – we still get in trouble in our second book, because our heroine really messed up, and she’s depressed. You can also get in trouble writing depressed – but actual depression, that’s clinical. We got into trouble for that, we got into trouble for her making bad choices and being-

From the Audience: Please keep doing that.

Margaret Stohl: They can’t stand her.

Holly Black: People were mad about Lila. They were mad.

From the Audience: When you say you got in trouble, do you mean from your editors, or-

Margaret Stohl: From our readers.

From the Audience: From your readers, so you just got backlash-

Margaret Stohl: Backlash, yeah.

Clare B. Dunkle: The editors- I don’t know about your experience, my editors have always been supportive.

Melissa Marr: And the thing to remember with the backlash is, for all of those readers and reviewers, where you get the backlash – I have to admit, I don’t read my own reviews very much, but I do read yours – and there are a lot of people that are applauding the strong characters, that all of you and many other authors are writing. I did want to ask a little bit about wickedness, and then I’d like to throw it open to the audience for questions. Do you feel any kind of – you mentioned wickedness and making mistakes- do you feel any kind of pressure from yourself, from the industry, your editors, agent, what have you- to avoid certain, I’ll be honest, certain sexual and moral issues within your books in order for your protagonist to be your protagonist (not necessarily your villainous characters). Do you feel any kind of limitations there, and how do you address those?

Holly Black: I think the thing that I see the most,  and concerns me the most, is that I think readers are the most critical. My editor and publishers actually, they love- in particular, when I was turning in the book, White Cat, my editor loved Lila – she said this is great, people will love this. Readers really had a really tough time, they got very angry that she was mean to the boy, and I think that that stuff is where I- my gauge of what is likable is so different from a lot of people’s gauge, that I do struggle with it and worry about it. Not so much- Certainly, yes – not really about sex, but I think that’s also true that my idea of what would be totally great for characters to have done or do may not be the same as what readers are then going to respond to and say, I’m not comfortable with this, I don’t like this girl is a good girl because of the things she’s done. And I’m going to go ahead and do what I’m going to do, but it worries me that my gauge feels so different from what readers seem to feel.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes: My early books were very, very clean – not because I was trying to make them clean, but because I’m a kind of a golly, gosh kind of person. Shockingly. In addition to not being able to kick ass, I also have trouble cursing.

Margaret Stohl: So we could all help you with that…

Jennifer Lynn Barnes: I’m already taking lessons. Actually another YA author offered to give me lessons on how to be mean.

Margaret Stohl: That was Holly, right?

Jennifer Lynn Barnes: That was actually Justine Larbalestier.

Holly Black: You should take her up on that!

(Laughter)

And there’s plenty more to this panel – this was only the first 26 minutes. Head on up to the audio for the rest!