Rose Lemberg on Feminist Characters

I've been meaning to link to this post by Rose Lemberg for awhile, about not "limiting the range of female characters to the kick-ass heroine," although that description reduces it down too much, so go read it. The comments are also insightful and interesting. I have to say---this is what I thought it was always supposed to be about. Creating individual, unique people in terms of your characters, attempting as much complexity and inconsistency and strength and weakness as we all have.***A tangent: I think to at least some extent, we're also seeing a kind of push-back against the kind of shrink-wrap, pre-packaging of cliche across several fronts, in part because the commodification of fiction, the reduction of it to just one aspect of the publishing process--as commercial product---is often incompatible with dealing in nuance, complexity, and individuality. This affects many aspects of a novel but is most noticeable, of course, in the context of the characters.Cliche, stereotype, thinking in terms of types rather than individuals, not putting enough thought or imagination into our decisions...these things don't just create bad writing, they diminish us as writers because it means we either don't care enough about really exploring and investigating human nature or we simply aren't capable of doing so.