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  • May 13th, 2013 10:35am

    Rebloggable by request: Write People.

    neil-gaiman:

    Hi Mister Gaiman! I’m a young, 22 year old writer currently working on a novel that I intend to feature a strong, female lead; however, as a male, I often find myself out of my element. I was wondering if you had any suggestions—are there any books/authors you might recommend that you feel write strong females rather well? Preferably in the sci-fi and/or fantasy genres. Thanks!
    –eglouis

    I don’t know how to answer this, other than, go and talk to women. There are lots of books you can read with strong women characters but ten minutes talking to a woman will give you more than you’ll get from a hundred books, whether the books are written by men or by women.

    Talk to them about what they like and don’t like about the way they are represented in fiction. Talk about hopes and dreams.  Ask any interesting but embarrassing questions you’ve ever wanted to ask but were too male or too shy or too sensible to ask. 

    And then, when you’ve done all that, remember that the most important thing to do is to write people who feel like people, and that women are people.

    (Also, find out what the Bechdel test is. It is your friend.)

  • May 8th, 2013 5:39pm

    seanhowe:

    “I remember the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had drawn a double-page spread in one of the Strange Tales sequences featuring Nick Fury on trial by Baron Strucker and the agents of HYDRA. I had something like a hundred figures in the background, all individual figures. I wrote a note to the colorist, Stan Goldberg, saying, “Stan, color all these men individually.” Stan would probably put a sheet of blue over the whole thing, and that seemed criminal, because—although it might look good—after all I had done all that work putting in all those figures, I didn’t want them all obliterated.

    I took the story up to Marvel, and Stan looked at it and said, “I’ve had it, Steranko. Do it yourself. Take it away. I never want to see you again; just take the stuff away and color it yourself.” So I started coloring all my material at that time, at $2.00 per page; later it went to $3 per page. I could only color about ten pages a day, so you can see I was losing a lot of money. I could have just been penciling for two or three times as much; but the strip emerged a more perfect marriage of concepts as a result. So I was willing to take less money, by using that time to color and thereby make the story come out better.”

    —Jim Steranko to George Olshevsky, 1977