It’s a new week of Women in SF&F Month, starting with a new guest post by Isabel J. Kim! Her short fiction has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023, 2024, and 2025, and it has been on the Locus Recommended Reading List multiple times. Some of her more recent short stories are “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,” a Nebula, Locus, and BSFA Award winner and Hugo Award finalist; “Wire Mother,” a 2026 Locus Award finalist; and “Freediver.” Her science fiction story “Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self” is the basis for her first novel, Sublimation, coming June 2. I’m thrilled she’s here today to discuss creating characters, particularly those of a different gender, in “Writing the Other.”
About Sublimation:
Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal, and the harsh permanence of the border: Sublimation is a thrilling and provocative debut for fans of Severance that asks what you’d sacrifice for a different life from award-winning author Isabel J. Kim.
The border cuts you in two.
When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.
Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.
She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.
How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?
Writing the Other
Shortly before I left the law firm, I had a conversation with my coworkers that I still think about today. We were in a bar—we were lawyers, of course we were in a bar—after work, and one of my friends leaned over and asked me, How do you write men? Followed by the questions, How is writing men different than writing women? Was it hard to learn?
The underlying assumption girding the question was: To write a different gender was a really difficult thing to do, and there were material tactics and facts that a person needed to learn to write another gender.
Which, yes, I suppose there are, the same way that there are tactics and facts one needs to learn to write a wizard in a faraway kingdom, or a spaceship pilot in the 54th century, or a deep-sea researcher diving in the oceans of Europa. Gender isn’t markedly more difficult than any of that. And people with gender? They live on earth, and you can even ask them about their lived experiences.
All pithy comments aside, “writing other genders” is an interesting thing to discuss, especially since “men writing women badly” comes up as a topic fairly often, and occasionally the converse, “women writing men inaccurately” is discussed, and even more rarely, “writing nonbinary people or other genders in any capacity at all” gets discussed. (Given the makeup of your social group and social media presence, you may have seen different opinions in different percentages.) And it’s a fair point, that when you begin writing, characterizing people who are different from you can be daunting, and the first thing a person is likely to try is writing a different gender.
In that sense, “writing gender” is an interesting way to talk about “writing the other,” which is pretty much all writing, especially fantasy and science fiction. I think about writing other perspectives a lot, because my own background is fairly diverse—I’m a Korean-American woman, and I spent part of my childhood overseas in Korea. But English was my first language and I read mostly western novels, where it felt like every protagonist was a white man, and the assumption of the writer was that only other white men would read these stories, not a ten-year-old Korean-American girl going to international school. Very poor future-proofing on these authors’ parts.
In contrast, it felt that often when an Asian woman was being written, she was a hastily sketched 2D orientalist stereotype. And even when an author was attempting to create a fully realized Asian woman, there would often be a significant overemphasis on her “otherness.” This all gave me a strong sense that I was in love with a genre that would never love me back, or ever think of me as a human being with human thoughts and human desires. Again: who will think of the precocious ten-year-old Korean-American girl?
Jokes aside, my experience reading speculative fiction was a kind of forced empathy. To enjoy the genre I had to get really good at empathizing with others and foreign situations very quickly. Similarly, my experience with writing was an exercise in both learning to make my characters relatable and empathetic to an audience who I had to assume came from a different background than I did. I don’t mean to sound self-pitying—I think to a large extent learning to make their specific human experience legible to the greater human population is the experience every writer should go through.
I also believe things are a lot better now both globally and in the speculative fiction space. The diversity of representation available to weird little Asian girls today is far greater than it was when I was younger. Even in these trying times, I do think the majority of people writing thoughtful fiction care about depicting the world and the people in it accurately and non-stereotypically. But I also think it’s easy to assume that “writing the other correctly” is a harder thing to do than it actually is, and simultaneously, I think there are also a lot of common pitfalls that an early-career author can fall into.
So, here is my checklist of things I remind myself whenever I’m writing a different gender, and by gender, I of course, mean “anything out of my comfort zone.”
- Everyone in the world, every single POV character, is just some guy, and from their point of view, they’re normal. They aren’t thinking about the things that make themselves different from you; to them, their characteristics are just background.
- The amount a character is thinking about gender is in and of itself a character trait. Think about how often you think about yours. You aren’t going about your day thinking about your gender unless it’s a particular friction point.
- Think about why a particular character is a particular gender: Are you trying to fulfill or subvert an archetype? Is this character a woman because you need a character that takes a more “passive” role in the story?
- A character isn’t usually thinking about their dimorphic characteristics that much, unless it is immediately relevant, or they have a character reason to be thinking about these characteristics. How often do you think about the color of your eyes? Or about your height? These things are apparent to the others around a person, but despite being relevant to the person’s life experience, they aren’t consciously thinking about them until it is brought up.
- Goals aren’t usually gendered or generalizable. People want specific things that are specific to their personality.
- When goals are gendered or a manifestation of societal trends, then the friction between the character’s goal and the larger societal mandate is often interesting. For example, if a woman wants to be a mother, but she’s a twenty-five-year-old single woman working in investment banking, she has two conflicting societal mandates—”succeed in her career” and “have a family.”
- How a character thinks about or interacts with others of different genders reveals more about the character than it does of the people they interact with. If a character’s POV talks a lot about how other characters look, well, that says something about the character, not about women, or men, or any gender as a whole.
- There’s no one way someone of a given gender notices potential romantic partners; the spectrum of traits that a person notices is very wide.
- Gendered socialization begins early, but the extent to which a person experiences gendered socialization as a positive or negative thing is an individual character difference—especially if the character isn’t cisgender.
And, to give an example of how I think about the ideas in this checklist when writing characters, I’m going to walk through the two main characters from my debut novel, Rose and Soyoung. The added twist here is that Rose and Soyoung are the same person, but one was raised in Korea, and the other was raised in America—so the gender norms that each character is working in are culturally distinct.
Neither Rose nor Soyoung thinks about their gender or ethnicity until it becomes relevant. Because Rose lives in America, she thinks about ethnicity more than Soyoung does, because she’s part of an ethnic minority in a multicultural society, and the narration from her perspective will occasionally mention her feelings on the subject. Because Soyoung lives in a more sexist society, she mentions gender a little more in her narration.
Both characters have relatively privileged lives, and because of temperament, don’t feel restricted by their gender. Therefore, they’re mostly going to consider it when they think they can use their gender and the stereotypes around it to their advantage. This is also the situation in which they’re thinking the most about their appearances, as well as when they’re trying to compare themselves to each other. The only other reason they think about their appearances is in the scenario where they’re attracted to someone and wonder how they might measure up in that someone’s mind.
With regards to their goals, Soyoung, having closer ties to her family and her culture, has absorbed more messaging around the path she “should” take in life, i.e., marriage and kids. And while she wants these things, she’s also primarily interested in something she thinks she shouldn’t want. Rose, on the other hand, doesn’t have as much baggage related to prescriptive life paths, and what she wants is unrelated to her gender.
And so on and so forth, as I work through how the characters relate to their genders.
The list isn’t exhaustive or prescriptive, and I write it mostly to encourage people to think through the process by which they attempt to create fully realized characters, and to examine their biases while doing so. At the end of the day, writing gender is a matter of making a number of choices that distill the general contours of human experience into the specific expression of one individual human, who exists within those general contours of human socialization and experience.
Or, to put it in sillier terms, you are not writing Every Woman Who Ever Existed. You are writing One Specific Woman. However, this One Specific Woman is going to be influenced by the existing norms of her society. Therefore, whether the One Specific Woman reads accurately as “A Woman” is going to at least partially depend on how she interfaces with what she knows are the stereotypical markers of Being A Woman or the Common Woman Experiences. But more importantly, whether she comes across as a fully realized person is going to depend on whether you characterized her as a person, more than any accuracy around her as a “A Woman.” And you can rephrase “Woman” with “Man,” “Person of Ethnicity Other Than Your Own” or “Spaceship Captain” as needed.
Or, to answer my coworker’s question from the beginning, I write other genders by situating a person within the context of their entire existence. If you want to bake a pie, you must first invent the universe.
 Photography by Amanda Silberling |
Isabel J. Kim lives near New York City in an apartment filled with books and swords. She is the author of numerous short stories and has won the Nebula, Locus, BSFA and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and reprinted in multiple best of the year anthologies. When she’s not writing, she’s practicing law or podcasting. Sublimation is her first novel. |
