Rambling: writing, self-inserts, and the nature of memory.
So, the current project (aka the Big Bang story, aka I Was Always a Woman and all I Got Was This Lousy Husb--Wait, I'm Married to Who?! Cancel That Complaint!) is, though still in its infancy (outline and 1500 or so words of a predicted lots more than that), giving me a lot of food for thought. Not just on gender, the nature of it versus how it's reinforced, because I'm actually pretty good on that front, but on writing more generally and how to build characters.
Child characters in particular, because I'm still in mid-scene 1, in which Toni Stark (technically Antonia, later Natasha, also later Iron...Individual) is seven years old, and writing her is proving to be thought-provoking. Mostly because of the process I've gone through to arrive at her.
First, I recall that this is Iron Man fanfic, not original [well, technically it's Captain America/Iron Man fanfic, but no one wants to see scenes from Steve's POV during this period, so he gets the second half], and therefore the place to begin is with Tony Stark. I think about him, get him in my brain until I can feel my way around him. And then I start taking things away.
Gone are the recent Years of Suck and Tragedy (boy, does he feel lighter!). Peel back more in time, and there goes Iron Man, Yinsen, and the shock that knocked him back on track. Peel back farther and peel away the thousand and one pressures on a man who went to MIT at fifteen and inherited a multibillion-dollar company at twenty-one. Farther, and there goes the first love, the first betrayal, the slowly growing neuroses. And now he's seven again, almost a blank slate now that I've taken away so many of the things that were writ large on his soul.
But it's not that simple. Though those things haven't happened yet, they will, and both I and my readers know they will. So while they won't be seen for several scenes, the things that build up to them are always there. This scene introduces Toni to Tiberius Stone, who will be her best friend, sometimes her lover, and bitter enemy. There's Howard Stark, who has yet to become loudly disappointed by Toni (who is, after all, a brilliant seven-year-old), but still "gets angry" when she gets bored at parties and runs away. There's Maria Stark, who isn't there nearly enough though Toni treasures the affection she does give (Tony's father has his own wikipedia page, but his mother appears so little in canon that she only has a mention). There is, by mention at least, Jarvis, the one whose name appears when any actual evidence of long-term parenting activity crosses Toni's mind. There is Jan Van Dyne, whose father let her design her own party dress, the kind of dress I would have wanted when I was six--
There's the difficulty. Because so much of who Tony is now serves as an unreliable guide to who Toni was then, I'm to a large degree filling in blank spaces with myself, with little facts I dredge up out of my memories. I know this tends to be critiqued as anything from "gratuitous Pepper Jack Cheese" to "Canon Sue", but I think it justified, because really, what else am I supposed to use, if not myself?
This scene is in her "voice", which bears a good deal of resemblance to vocal details I recall, like a smaller vocabulary, simpler sentence structure, and a tendency to keep sentences going until they just can't go any more. There are vocal patterns in here that you'd never hear out of adult Tony's mouth, but that's okay, because if the voice of a seven-year-old sounded like the voice of an adult, something would be very wrong. So she may sound something like me, or like my sister. Is there a problem? Neither of us are engineering geniuses, but we were very articulate seven-year-olds for all that, and since I don't have any actual seven-year-olds available to question, and it's my experience that your average adult remembers even less of childhood than I do, it's really the best I can do.
Toni spends most of the words to date being bored, itching at the collar of her fancy dress, and dreading the inevitable dullness of the grownup party her parents are having. None of this is from Tony; it's all from me, from every memory I have of being bored to tears because I was the only person at the party under twenty, from every dress that looked nice but was uncomfortable, from every time an adult asked me inane questions that I had to answer politely, from every party I couldn't run away from no matter how much I wanted to.
Is this treading on the self-insert edge? I don't really think so. Toni's not me, she's not something I even want to be. Notice how the things I dumped into her are mostly kind of unpleasant? That's not self-insert. That's connecting with the character.
Because really, what do I have to join me up to Toni at any age, Toni who's unrelentingly brilliant and a social butterfly and does more in the average month than I'll ever manage (or want) to accomplish? So many of the things she values are things I don't value, so many of her reasons are ones that don't motivate me, so many of her issues are ones I don't struggle with. How am I supposed to get under her skin?
For a start, by remembering that she was a late-life child whose parents' friends would have had children far her senior, and that she must have spent a great deal of time at parties with few or no other children. By remembering that she was smarter than many of her peers. By remembering that she would rather be alone doing what she loves than making small talk with adults who talk down to her or talk over her head. By remembering that itch of lace that was so pretty when she first put it on but becomes torture in an hour of boredom.
It's the little things I can share with her that open the door. And then inside her soul I find the others. I find the person who is never going fast and far enough, I find the person who wants to be loved but doesn't know how, I find the person who loves some things beyond belief, I find the person who wants to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity but just can't anymore, I find the person who seesaws between self-congratulation and self-loathing. I find the person who laughs and cries, who loves and hates, who is just another person trying to grab some control of the out-of-control spaceship that is life.
And then I go remove my analogy-o-tron for cleaning.
I'm mildly concerned, on a gender level, with the fact that Toni spent a fair amount of time so far thinking about her dress, which Tony would not do. In my defense, she's mostly thinking about how much it itches, which is non-gender-related. The parts where she thinks her dress is pretty (and her favorite color, red with gold trim, because it's not like there's a reason for the armor to be red and gold other than because Tony likes the colors) and where she wants a soft fuzzy velvet dress like her mother's...I defend myself with the argument that no one ever gave Tony a pretty party dress. It's difficult to be enthused by a selection of near-identical suits. The caring-about-clothes thing is, in my opinion, solidly in the "nurture" category however you want to slice it. Women's formal clothing looks different, while men's looks all the same. (I'm pretty sure Toni's dress is taffeta, which looks better than it feels.)
This scene amuses me. It isn't really critical to the plot, but I like having it here, and as I'm tracing the changes being female makes to Toni, jumping straight to age 15 would be too much of a shock.