Making it personal

 This week I’ve been doing two things.  The first was re-reading Elizabeth Bear’s space opera novel Machine, and the second was starting to chapter plan a re-write of one of my twenty five year old novels.  And as I’ve worked on the plan alongside my reading I’ve been seeing the similarities between the two narratives.

In Elizabeth Bear’s book a huge, sprawling story is told through the eyes of one character, in first person.  This makes the story very personal.  It means that the reader gets to learn a lot about the main character’s life, and body.

She is disabled, in the sense that she wears an exoskeleton to support a body which is always in pain.  A great deal of the narrative revolves around her regulating her pain levels.  The whole story is laced through with observations about the character’s exhaustion and pain levels.

This sounds like an absolute turn-off, but this character isn’t a victim.  She is a doctor, who specialises in jumping out of spaceships to enter stricken ships and rescue their crews.  And at one point in the story she is forced to run away from a machine trying to kill her.  So she is very much a character with agency.

It struck me when I started writing my chapter plan that I was doing a similar thing with my new main character.  She is a completely different person from the woman who was my original character.  For a start, she’s operating under a false name.  She’s chosen to do that because she’s running away from her family and her mother’s insistence that she breed.

One of the things which has changed a great deal in science fiction over the last decade is the discussion of sexuality.  It has now got to the point where authors are marketing their stories as female/female romance, or male/male relationship stories.  Part of this change is driven by cultural changes.  Many of those authors are openly gay, and make a feature of writing about queer sexuality.

So this is another change I’ve made to my main character.  My main characters are usually aromantic asexual women, but in the past that was implied simply by showing them not being in relationships.  But in this new book, and in the previous two, I’ve explicitly stated the sexuality of all my main characters.

This definitely has the effect of making the stories seem more personal.  The characters are now outing themselves to the reader, laying their beliefs and values bare.

Making characters’ stories more personal in this way makes them more believable, and somehow more vulnerable too.  It makes them seem more real, and I like the change.