Writing Plus-Sized Characters: new article at Adventurotica.com

[naamah_darling]

New article up at Adventurotica! Free to read (as is everything on the site but the members-only story content).

Writing the plus-sized character.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a fat girl, and knows that I am committed to the principles of size acceptance. It's very important to me. So, in my stories, I try to make an effort to include

Comments

[madmoisellestar]

...or that she is self-conscious about her body because she feels she is too thin, and so forth. (Not that plenty of women don't feel self-conscious because they're really thin, they do, and that is terribly painful, but this is something that pops up in so much women's fiction, and it is obviously a way of giving the character an arguably less-than-ideal body type without violating the cultural sense of propriety that dictates that fat people are unsightly...Thank you for this. It is so fucking common and such a fucking cop out. She's gotta be humble and unaware of her beauty, but god forbid she be chubby, no reader is going to to empathize with a fattie, so... Ugh. I feel like I'm going to throw the next book that uses that idiot hackneyed device

[naamah_darling]

Your readers come from this world and they know that 'too thin to be considered a true beauty' or whatever bullshit phrase it is really means 'totally bangin' by conventional/modern standards, and -bonus- relatably, non-threateningly insecure about it!'

Spot on.

And you know, in some types of stories that aren't erotica or romance it doesn't bother me all that much. Sometimes it works for the story and the character, and is done well. But there's a specific way we are asked to identify with a main character in a sex/romance story that just becomes oppressive and skeevy when played at that angle. Please, I spend so much of my time hurting over how I look, I don't want to have that rubbed in my face in a book that's ostensibly about escape, and I sure as fuck don't want it rubbed in my face with the thing I want and can never have and almost fucking killed myself trying to get being used as the "undesirable" thing! She's too thin? How much worse should I feel, being too FAT? She thinks she's too thin but she's secretly actually

[savannahdreamer]

This is why I continue to red Jennifer Cruisie if I am reading a hetero romance novel. She has awesome things like child free characters and many of the women she writes about are chubby at minimum.

She makes fat sexy by using words like round and voluptuous and full and heavy and the only time I have heard her talk about a character needing to lose a few pounds is out of the voice of the abusive mother.

I am pro real women descriptions. Give me a flat chested athletic woman or a round and chubby one! Give me a woman over the age of 25! The rampant agism is another issue that makes me crazy. People over 28 must be dead downstairs I guess. I tend to pair these two together because age and size are the plagues of women's self esteem in this country.

[cissa]

Jennifer Cruisie ROCKS.

[fierynotes]

In a couple of Spider Robinson's books (the Callahan's Bar series, in particular), it comes out that the main character has a strong preference for fat women, and he made it clear that the women in question were fat as opposed to curvy. He did it with equal parts frankness and admiring lust, if I recall.

If I remember correctly, Mary Callahan comes up in Callahan's Secret, where the main character likes fat women, but also in Lady Slings the Booze, in which the main character has no particular taste for fat women but still can't help noticing her. "Can you picture a sexy sumo? If yu can't, there's no point in me trying to describe her, and if you can, I just did." In Callahan's Lady, the main character is a (mostly straight) woman who can't help noticing -- she saw Mary asleep once and described her as something Rubens would have painted for a private collector.

I don't know how useful you'll find this, since your voice is not Spider Robinson's voice, but I'm throwing it out there.

[lunalelle]

I plan to subscribe again, soon. I only have one source of disposable income at the moment, and it's a bit shaky.

[bumponalog]

Check out how Janet Evanovich describes Lula in her Stephanie Plum novels. A plus-size woman in size 10 spandex sort of thing.And she always gets her man.

[cest4chans]

Since when did size 10 turn into plus sized? Didn't "average" used to be 10-14?

[bumponalog]

Yes, but Lula always wears clothing rather smaller in size than might seem appropriate to her actual size and yet to actually suit it somehow.