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@tashah-claymore That’s exactly how I was thinking to uncover the secret of enslaved dragons – MC discovers a dragon by accident, and the whole thing begins to unravel. Eventually the truth comes out and society has to undergo gigantic structural changes to accomodate the grass-roots revolution that arise….. *looks off into the distance*

I already have snippets I wanna write…. gosh I don’t like new ideas that upheave all my existing projects. XD

@bree-dawn Cool!

@princess-foo Short stories are much more tricky to do, because of the limitations of the cast of characters – and the limitation of the story itself. Its focus must be razor sharp, and only some stories are going to allow multiple female characters to talk together – if you even have more than one female character in a short story.

Oh boy, @ the Lampshade test. Yeah…. I’ve read some books like that. Middle grade fiction, not very serious literature. But still ick. It’s… not that hard to write a woman, people. Seriously… Just build a character according to all the normal writing rules…

@devastate-lasting I think this is probably not a bad thing. The kind of stories you write will effect how much this rule can be used as a legitimate metric or judge. In long-form novels, it should probably be a thing. But in short stories, or in fiction that isn’t focused on slice-of-life stuff… it seems like an artificial rule to require the Bechdel test. It’s more of a curiosity to me than anything else.

@seekjustice It’s great! I love all this discussion too! There’s definitely such a fine line between empowering female characters and turning them into slightly-modified feminists. I’m trying to find that balance in my own female characters. In order to write an interesting, action-oriented story that doesn’t sideline female characters into peripheral roles, it’s very easy to pull them across the aisle and make them act in the same capacity as men, but they just look like women. This limits femininity to an external set of appearances, which is a dangerous idea, when you really think about it. There’s so much more to femininity than that.

Thankfully, in our stories, we can use characters acting outside of their roles in order to showcase the necessity of the proper role by reverse. So that makes things easy. The way we present the truths in our stories doesn’t always have to be cookie-cutter black-and-white.

@kelly-lundgren Why do you think it is difficult for you to write female characters?

@sageinthemeadow Ah! A greenhouse. That makes sense now. XD

Yeah, my job is pretty neat. I enjoy it a lot.

@hope-ann I think you’re right about doing what the story requires. We should tell the story that we are telling.

But it is interesting to consider flipping the Bechdel test on its head: Does a story have two male characters talking about something other than a woman? Nearly every story ever would pass this test. I think that’s partially the point of the test. It reveals that there’s an implicit bias towards male-dominant storytelling. I’m not making a judgment call one way or another (war and action seem to be more male-oriented topics anyway, and they’re hallmarks of storytelling because tension/conflict), but it’s really interesting all the same. What are the lenses through which we unconsciously approach storytelling as a whole? Are they really without any bias one way or another? Or are they worth reconsidering?

@emgc *chuckles* I don’t really think that’s exactly what the test is getting at. I mean, partially, but “talking about a guy” doesn’t just have to be romantically. It could be one of the girls’ fathers, for example. In which case the focus of the conversation is still a guy. The test is about whether you’ve given your female characters a part of the story that doesn’t tie back to any male character.

New question is in the doc, so we’ll tackle that next week! Look out for it!