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Writing Female Characters

Anushia Kandasivam: So, Brandon, you just introduced a really amazing female character [Spensa] to us. Your female characters throughout all your books are resourceful and independent. Some of them are leaders, some of them go through very interesting journeys of growth and self-discovery. Some of your female characters, like Vin and Sarene, they have mentors and teachers who are men, but their decisions about who to be and what to do are always their own. They always have agency. Was it a conscious choice to write these female characters and their journeys like this, and can you tell us if the process was easy or difficult?

Brandon Sanderson: So, there are a number of different responses to this. One is, I came into fantasy by way of some excellent female novelists that I highly recommend. Barbara Hambly was my first experience with fantasy, and then Anne McCaffery, Melanie Rawn, and Jane Yolen were kind of my introduction to fantasy. It's how I got pulled into it. To the point that when I was first given a David Eddings book, I was hesitant, because I was like, "Is this a genre guys can write?" was my honest reaction to that.

So, when I started writing my own books, I knew I wanted to do a good job with this, but I was really bad at it at the start. It was very embarrassing to me as a writer. And this happens to all new writers. There are things that you want do that, in your head, you imagine yourself doing very well, and then when you start out, you just do poorly. And the later in life that you start writing your stories, the more you're generally able to recognize how poorly you're doing things that you want to do well. And my very first book, that I didn't publish, particularly the female lead was very generic, and written very much to fill the role of love interest rather than to be a character. And I recognized it, even as I was writing it, but I didn't know how to do it differently. And it took practice. It took a lot of work. It really shouldn't, on one hand, right? Write the characters as people. rather than as roles. That's what you have to learn is - everybody is the hero of their own story in their head. They're the protagonist, whoever they are. And writing the characters so that they view themselves that way, and so they have autonomy, and they aren't being shoved around by the plot or by the protagonist, or things like this, but it's just very hard to do. I had a lot of early readers who were very helpful. I often credit my friend Annie as being one of the big reasons why Sarene eventually ended up working in Elantris. And she gave me some early reads, and things like this.

But, you know... it is hard to abandon our own preconceptions that we don't even know are there without practice, effort, and somebody pointing them out to you. And it was just a matter of practice and trying to get better. And I still think that there are lots of times I get it wrong. And you mentioned Mistborn. And I was really determined that I was going to do a good female protagonist. I try to stay away from the kind of cliched term "strong female character." Because we don't talk about "strong male characters."

We talk about characters who are distinctive, interesting, flawed, and real people. And I was determined to do this with Vin. And I feel like I did a pretty good job. But, of course, I had a completely different blind side in that I defaulted to making the rest of the crew that Vin interacts with all guys.

This is because my story archetype for Mistborn was the heist novel, the heist story, and my favorite heist movies are Ocean's Eleven and Sneakers and The Sting, and these are great stories. I absolutely love them. But they all are almost exclusively male casts. And that's not to say that, you know, someone can't write an all-male cast if they want to. But it wasn't like I had sat down and said, "I'm intentionally going to write an all-male cast." I just defaulted to making the rest of the cast male because that was the archetype that was in my head, that I hadn't examined.

And so, when I got done with those books, I looked back, and I'm like, "Wouldn't this have been a better and more interesting story if there had been more women in the cast?" And I absolutely think it would have been. But becoming a writer, becoming an artist, is a long process of learning what you do well, what you do poorly, what you've done well once and want to learn how to replicate, what you've done poorly and want to learn to get better at. It's a very long process, I think, becoming the writer that we want to be.

This National Park Just Shoots Poachers to Protect The Rhino Population

culturenlifestyle:

Kaziranga National Park has been successful in the conservation of rhinos — to protect the fellow critters, its workers will shoot and even kill a potential poacher. To date, the park has killed 50 people.

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Can't stop watching this

paprika hendl

This is the recipe I’ve been using for years for Paprikash. (a.k.a. Paprikás Csirke / paprika hendl) In respose to the current hype, I figured I’d share it with you all. Makes 6 servings.

Ingredients

Oil, butter or lard – 2 tablespoons

Chicken thighs, deboned & skin-on – 2 ½ to 3 pounds

Onions, thinly sliced – 2 (or 3 if small)

Hungarian sweet paprika – ¼ cup

Korean chili flakes – 2 teaspoons

Pastry flour – 2 tablespoons

Poultry stock, unsalted – 1 ½ cups

Red bell peppers, diced – 2

Salt and pepper – to taste

Sour cream – 1 cup

Lemon juice (optional) – 1 tablespoon

Directions

Heat the oil over medium-high flame in a large cast iron skillet. Add the chicken skin-side down and brown until skin is crispy, about 7 minutes. Remove to a board, and cut into bite-size pieces.

Remove any excess oil leaving about 2 tablespoons and add the onions. Sauté the onions until wilted and beginning to brown. Stir in the paprika and flour and cook for 1 to 2 minutes.

Whisk in the stock in portions, breaking up any lumps. Add the browned chicken pieces, bell peppers. and the salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through and tender.

Stir in the sour cream and lemon juice if using. Adjust seasoning and reheat over low flame. Serve hot with noodles or gnocchi.

Variations

Mushrooms can be added with the stock.

Kosher version: Instead of sour cream, use 50% more flour and 33% more lemon juice. For passover use potato starch instead of flour.

How TV Cartoons Are Made - A (Mostly) Simplified Guide

When I was in school and wanted to work in animation, there was very little information about how cartoons are actually made. Even my professors at college knew very little about the industry as it is today. I’m sure it would’ve been better to study somewhere in California (like CalArts) to be better informed about this stuff, but I didn’t have that opportunity.

Nowadays, many kids in school have a dream career that they don’t really know much about. There’s a lot of missing bits of information and a lot of straight up lies that get circulated as fact as people try to scramble to put the pieces together on how cartoons for television are actually made.

I’ve been storyboarding for television for a while now, and there still aren’t clear resources for those wanting to get into the industry. I wanted to make the basics available to everyone, so here’s a quick rundown through the TV pipeline. Please note: all studios and productions are different. Even cartoons made within the same studio could have wildly different production guidelines. This is not a concrete explanation of how every cartoon is made; this is simply a generalized look at the “typical” television pipeline.

**DISCLAIMER** All images in this post have been sourced from blogs, twitters, scribd and flickr pages are publicly available, and no internal studio materials have been used that have not been already published publicly online. This post is influenced heavily by my own individual experience, as well as friends’. 

With that said, this might be a lengthy read, so let’s go!

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