In a contest like WOTF that has around 2,500 entries a quarter, anything and everything that helps a story stand out is an advantage. The same applies for submissions to magazines, except often these same kinds of things can keep a story from getting published. Strong religious undertones are often considered preachy and alienating by editors. But different and unusual, that can work for magazines. You've just got to pick and choose your subjects based upon the market they are intended for.

Certainly stories with female leads are easier to sell than they used to be even ten years ago when, as an example, Elizabeth Moon's agent apparently had one heck of a time selling Deed of Paksenarrion. (I have always been amused at the story that the publisher who bought it was insistent that a woman couldn't possibly understand military theory but then backed down when he found out that she is an ex-marine) But the expectation is still that the female will be dragged along as the weepy love interest.

I am happy to say it has gone beyond being an "exception" for a SF main character to be female. But it's still a bit of an unhill battle.

Personally I simply have no interest in writing religious themes, although that doesn't mean that I object to reading them. Many books, including LotR, have them. I was surprised at luapc's comment that religious themed stories did better and it made me curious.

[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited September 15, 2007).]

Anyway, no one ever said life was fair did they?

I read Volume 22 and half the stories seemed to deal with religion. The Sword From the Sea dealt with an cruel Sea God. On the Mount dealt with seeking and stopping posthumans who play God. At the Gate of God dealt with a Catholic priest and a Muslum cleric teaming together to stop an experiment from creating another Big Bang (lots of Tower of Babel references). Tongues dealt with a human inflitrating an alien civilization to understand thier religion. Broken Stones (if I remember) dealt with the clash of an alien civilization and its Muslum occupiers.

I don't think WOTF is biased against strong female characters at all. After all, a female is the first reader! And if you read Volume 22, you'll find many female viewpoint characters. The Sword From the Sea. Schroedinger's Hummingbird. Broken Stones. The Bone Fisher's Apprentice. On the Mount alternated between male and female viewpoint characters.

It's not likely that the inclusion or exclusion of religion themes, or the predomination of male or female characters matter to WOTF as much as writing a good original SF&F story period.

The first reader is female, but that says nothing about the other judges, certain ones of whom have made their opinions well known. Of the, I believe, 20 judges, 3 are women. However, although I have read some winners, I haven't read enough of them to be able to say one way or the other. I have felt there was a dearth of strong female characters--the females seemed pretty wimpy, but as I said I haven't read all of them.

Half of them being religious is a pretty strong preference in my opinion. So you can look at it as having a religiously based story gives you a big advantage or not having one puts you at something of a disadvantage--or having an anti-religious story probably totally puts you out of the running. It may be something good for people who really want to win it to know the best way to win. So it might be worthwhile to write a story about religion.

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Kathy Wentworth has said that a passive character would definitly get the story knocked out of the running.

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If there is a slight bias, it's in the selection of science fiction over fantasy...

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Kathy Wentworth has said that a passive character would definitly get the story knocked out of the running.

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Being passive is perfectly reasonable in a PoV character that is not the main character or one that is put in to be nothing more than a love-interest. I doubt that being passive in a secondary character would disqualify the story if the main character is active.

Watson was mostly passive and this was perfectly appropriate for his character. He was there to observe and tell the story, which would not have been appropriatedly told by Holmes, as an example.

I don't believe that it would at all get a story disqualified to have a passive PoV character that wasn't the main character or for that matter to have secondary characters who are passive, and I'm afraid I find it hard to believe that she said such a thing would.

Robert, I don't know that there is a disadvantage to strong female characters. It was a feeling I got from reading a few winners and from knowing the stated opinions of a couple of judges, but I hadn't read enough of them to be able to say that for a fact. I didn't mean to give the impression that I had.

This approach to WotF has a writer guessing the prejudice of ALL the judges. Even when there are statements we could dig out, I suspect they're contradictory. It's nearly impossible to please so many creative people on such subjective terms. My point, and opinion, is: Why bother?

I expect to get to a WotF entry perhaps in the next year. I intend to write about a strong, active character, probably female, because that's the type of character I like and can build a connection to for a reader. I'll try to do a good job of the writing and take my chances with the strong woman and only the most subtle religious or political theme, if any.

WOTF was set up by L. Ron Hubbard, one of the most prolific and successful writers in the field. If you've ever read the things he's written about how to write, you soon see that to him, the business of writing trumped even the quality of the story. While I don't agree with that, it has its lessons to be learned.

While WOTF is not buying the stories in the same sense as a magazine, they are following the same process with the same result. While magazines have a slush editor to get through, WOTF has its coordinating judge, Kathy Wentworth. And just like with a magazine, as unpublished authors, you have to get past the prejudices and preferences of that first reader, as well as meet the requirements of the publication. Only after that do the other judges even enter into the equation. Only eight get past Kathy Wentworth as finalists and on to the other judges out of about 2,500 in a quarter.

That said, I think that the best thing to do for the contest is not to write necessarily by a formula, but to write a good, entertaining, and thoughtful story. Doing that is the best solution to meeting any first reader's standards.

I would like to say first of all, I might unintentionally misremember(memory is a malleable thing) and sometimes be flat out wrong(in the abundace of many words there is transgression), but I won't intentionally deceive.

The blurbs I can find right now (through the notes from WOTF attendee Eric James Stone) say: Avoid Passive Characters. I know that Kathy Wentworth has elaborated a little in the past on the sff.net WOTF log, and certainly the question can be posed to her for clarification there.

Of course, those three words leave room to many interpretions. Evidently, it would apply to the main characters and usually the viewpoint character is a main character. I can't think of an instance in Volume 22 where this was not the case, though it's been many months since I've finished reading it. It's very hard for aspiring writers to pull off.

Kathy has said that a child as the main character isn't such a good idea (not in those exact words, of course). She said that children aren't always free to act in our society and tend to be passive characters. Of course, all the main charcters in Games On A Children's Ward are children--and very proactive in thier domain.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with aiming your writing at a particular audience. Authors do it all the time. Knowing that judges have a preference for stories with some degree of a religious theme or certain types of main characters could be something to take into consideration in deciding what to enter or what to write to enter, and I don't see anything at all wrong with that.

Judges are human, just as editors and publishers are. They have preferences and bring their own life assumptions to what they do just as I do to what I write. I might not agree with those, but I can't blame them for doing it. In fact, they should just as I should. Otherwise we aren't being true to our own muse--or whatever you want to call it.

I've read volume 23--and I think only two of the stories have a strong female protag. Many of them have strong female secondary characters, though. I tend to write a lot of stories with a female protagonists--but the further in the past I set the story, the more likely it is the protagonist will be male (for the same reason Kathy Wentworth mentioned about children--women in medieval times had less freedom and power than men and have thus more chance to be acted upon rather than act).

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(for the same reason Kathy Wentworth mentioned about children--women in medieval times had less freedom and power than men and have thus more chance to be acted upon rather than act).

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Okay, this is what confuses me... we aren't writing about Medieval times, we're writing about speculative times. We can use any paradigm we wish, and yet the default seems to be Medieval Europe for fantasy. I find this frustrating.

Edited to say: I'm not trying to point the finger at you, Silver3. It's a prevalent attitude, and what you said just triggered my thought.

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My story in WOTF was religious--only in the sense that it had gods in it and a priest, not in the sense of being preachy. But of course it's set during Aztec times, and not including the religion would really have been inaccurate.

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For me, fantasy stories are filled with gods and priests and such, so I have never considered writing that into a fantasy story being religious. My story that JeanneT is referring to at the beginning of this thread, is similar to what Silver3 is referring to, as it's based on Norse Gods and those that serve them. A kind of alternate story on the standard legends and myths.

What confuses me on the issue of religion in fiction is how it can be interpreted so differently by different people. Even if a story has no religious connotations in the author's view, it can often be mistaken that way by readers. Like a lot of things, I guess the only answer is to write it, then give it readers and see what they say.

As far as female protags, I have to admit that female protags have never felt as real to me as male ones. Part of the reason for that is that I am male and grew up when acceptable non-gender pronouns were always male, never female. It was also a time when I read mostly science fiction, and it was extremely rare to see a female main character, as almost every writier was male, and wrote male protags.

But the market has changed, especially in fantasy. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think that today there are more female readers of fantasy than males. That being the case, it would be foolish to forget about the possible majority of readers of a genre.

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for the same reason Kathy Wentworth mentioned about children--women in medieval times had less freedom and power than men and have thus more chance to be acted upon rather than act).

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I probably am the worst person to defend passive characters considering that I almost never write them even as secondary characters, but I can see all kinds of reasons for a secondary or tertiary character to be passive and can't imagine that having a secondary or tertiary character be passive would be a reason for disqualification of an entry. But hey, who knows.

As whether gender makes a difference or not, it might be interesting to compare the number of female winners to the number of male winners. The entries are judged without names, but do you suppose female entrants are more likely to make an entry with a STRONG female MC? I find the percentage to be interesting. I'm sure there is no way to confirm whether the percentage of female winners reflects the percentage of female entrants, but I will have to say I personally rather doubt it. Oh well, such is life.

It's the first podcast I've ever downloaded. It is one entire block, but I listened to it while I was doing the dishes and sweeping the floor, and it made the time go by.

I think Volume 23 comes out today. I'm going to hold off on reading it for a few days until I send my story out for Q4. If I get to reading, I can easily get intimidated by the quality of writing and chicken out.

BTW, the Q207 winners (first, second, and third placers) are all women...

Of course, we might be able to gauge the percentage the genders of the winners by name(though some of the names are initialized and thus ambiguous), but without knowing the gender percentage going into the contest there is no way of measuring bias.

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What if the change in the character is actually doing something? Would that be considered passive, since there is passive tendencies at the start?

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In this case, the character would be considered passive before the change, then active later.

In a way, this is the classic hero myth--the hero goes about his or her daily life, essentially as a passive character, and then there's the call to action, which makes the hero kick into active gear. The trick is, the call to action usually happens rather early on, making the character active early on. Think Star Wars, when Luke's aunt and uncle are killed. He's essentially passive until that point (he might even be passive later--the details of the plot are escaping me...)

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I is interesting that most of the finalists are male, but it could be misleading. The reason is that there are no figures for the stories submitted by males and females. This ratio of roughly 9 out of 12 finalists is 75%, but would not be at all out of line if the entry rate of male to female authors was the same. I'm not saying it is, I'm just pointing that out.

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Edit: In considering this, I was amused to realize that in the story I just entered, it would be a toss-up who is the protag. The PoV character is female, but you could make an argument that the male is the protag-- He is certainly at least as strong and active a character. *shrug*