All the single ladies

“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.”
―Daphne du Maurier

Celebrated author of The Fault in Our Stars, John Green (@realjohngreen), set off a twitter firestorm yesterday when he suggested that people were unnecessarily harsh on Stephanie Meyer and that much of the vitriol surrounding the Twilight Saga was because misogynists dislike and dismiss things simply because teen girls like them.  I’m paraphrasing his words here, and probably getting his point wrong, but to be fair it wasn’t entirely clear.  He later somewhat clarified by saying that what he meant to say was that women writers tend to get treated more harshly in the media and that we give male writers a pass when it comes to misogyny.  But that’s not what he actually said.

Okay.

Being a woman writer, I felt a little compelled to weigh in.  Firstly, I have read the Twilight Saga and the writing isn’t good.  It’s pretty terrible actually.  One particular simile will haunt me (“the tires screeched like a person screaming”) because after I read it I felt compelled to start marking all over the book with a red pen.  What Meyer does expertly is create characters that are 1) blank enough yet still a Mary Sue, so that readers can insert themselves easily into the role (The Oatmeal called her “Pants” for this reason in a humorous opinion article), and 2) an exaggerated versions of absolute perfection, but you know, still real and stuff.

Now I’m not going to argue that we don’t give men a pass on misogyny (i.e. Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc., which children are still supposed to swallow in secondary school without ever criticizing), however this is not a reason to give women a pass on bad writing just cause they’re ladies who write lady things.

Which brings me to another Twitter firestorm as of late.  Potato Salad Gate.  Some idiot reader/writer (I can’t remember who because he was just an idiot who isn’t worth mentioning by name) decided that all women have the same POV, write essentially the same story, with little or no creativity, and all those stories somehow include making potato salad.  Huh?  Yeah, I was confused too.  But lots of people chimed in with the same tired old line of “good scripts will rise to the top of the pile” regardless of the writer.  Looking at what is put onto screens big and small, we all know that isn’t true.  (update: this same idiot recently fully completed his career-suicide-by-twitter by reiterating that all women have the same POV and that this is why they aren’t writing groundbreaking scripts. Oh, and he said “girls.”  “Girls” all have the same POV.  Which to me just says he’s still a boy.)

Sigh.

I want to see groundbreaking scripts regardless of your gender.  But if you wanted to throw a couple more complex female protagonists into the mix, I wouldn’t cry about it.  Regardless of YOUR gender.