Gender Issues

I haven't blogged in quite a while, so I thought I should kick off my return to blogdom with a bang: how I changed David to Dana...

While reworking my entire work-in-progress novel for a third time, I had a revelation. After getting asked over and over by my fellow critiquers if my girl main character had feelings for the boy sidekick character, David, I thought about whether this sidekick really needed to be a boy. By changing him to a girl might help some of my plot problems. I decided to go for it: David would become Dana.

At first thought, all I would need to do was a quick find/replace of the word "him" to "her," "he" to "she," etc. But, as I reread the scenes with Dana, I realized that changing a character's gender wasn't going to be that simple.

As David, the sidekick character was nonchalant, active, and outspoken. As a boy, these characteristics weren't anything that stood out. However, once the character became a girl, the traits made quite a statement about her personality. For instance, when David guzzled his milk, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary. But when I changed the character to a girl (Dana), she no longer could get away with guzzling the milk without the reader drawing conclusions about what she was like.

As I shared the problem with a writing listserv I belong to, the topic caused quite a stir. Many people felt that we need more strong, tomboyish girls in children's literature. Although I agree, I also worried about creating a different stereotype. You see, this character races sled dogs. By having her be a "tomboy," I was afraid I was then giving the impression that a girl has to be masculine to be a musher. I didn't want that either. I went back and forth as to how "feminine" Dana should be. I wrote scenes both ways: with Dana as what might be considered a traditional female character and with Dana as what would be considered a tomboy. I was still torn.

I went back and forth with advantages to both traits for this character. Unfortunately, I had to decide for myself who this character was before I could begin my David to Dana transformation. Regardless to what I did, it was definitely going to be more than a matter of changing some "he's" to "she's"...