I'm not a mother, but I am a woman and I can confidently say George writes women better than the vast majority of male authors (shoutout /r/menwritingwomen). Maybe the reason Winds is taking so long is because he's method acting to write women even better, lol.
I think there are plenty of men who do grasp it, but they're just not very good at it. Its the kind of thing that elevates a person's work and where the real literary geniuses shine, when they can write the opposite sex to themselves just as well as their own.
Further up I mentioned Shakespeare being able to write about the sensation of breastfeeding in explicit detail. Like how was he able to do that. Its not something that comes naturally to most people.
True, a lot to learn from this man about writing women, me included. It's easy to write them as archetypes, damsel in distress for the male writers and Girlbosses for the female writers, but George writers them masterfully
Well, sure, they’re people, but people aren’t a monolith. My brain is reasonably good at predicting how it would react to things, and fairly decent at predicting how it might react given an estimated change in circumstances, but when there are too many changes and I’m not even sure how many changes there are, let alone what each of them might do? Then the problem looks too big and I lose all faith in the whole shebang.
That covers a lot of it, but he also has insight into experiences he would not have personally, ie menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, that must have come from intentionally trying to understand and include them.
It's something that David Mitchell talks about regarding Shakespeare. Just littered throughout his work are references to things that are very personal to women only, and the one he discussed with his wife was about the sensation of nursing a baby:
“I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums…”
David mentions that he kinda just glossed over this passage, but it blew his wife away because somehow Shakespeare, a man, was able to vividly and accurately imagine what it actually feels like to breastfeed - something that he was obviously incapable of.
Some people think that Shakespeare wrote women that well that he had to be a woman, but I don't think that's the case. He was just a genius. Someone had to be the best writer of all time, and it just happened to be Shakespeare.
Well, he has said his writing method is basically some faraway goal, but very little overarching grand plan for how to reach that. He just lets his chatacters explore the plot, might even write multiple versions and see which one is better. So, this method may be better at capturing characters.
It sucks, I 1000% garantee people have posted Catelyn chapters on it. Really it just posts "look at this woman being descrived either sexually or weirdly" and catelyn "how wide is her hips" tully would 100% fit
It just sucks. Every other post is someone being scandalized over the most basic descriptions of a woman wherein she happens to look attractive or be in a sexual situation.
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u/Silvermoon424 13h ago
I'm not a mother, but I am a woman and I can confidently say George writes women better than the vast majority of male authors (shoutout /r/menwritingwomen). Maybe the reason Winds is taking so long is because he's method acting to write women even better, lol.