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Guest Post: We need to talk about the lack of realistic character response to sexual violence in Sci&Fi and Fantasy by Sammy HK Smith

We can do better. 

I spend my working week with both survivors and perpetrators of physical and sexual abuse, and consider myself privileged that these survivors trust in me to help them, and I’m dedicated in bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Leaving that behind at the end of the working day is tough, and I often find myself reaching to fiction to shut off and “˜decompress’. Often though, my work finds me in literature and I despair.

We’ve all read those stories: characters beaten, raped, sexually assaulted and they often rise from the ashes stronger and resolute, or they become a broken husk. The sexual assault is often used as a plot element (or, dare I say it, trope) to move the main narrative forward but seldom given the actual scrutiny it deserves. Often too, the abuse is used to push forward a “˜revenge’ plotline or used as a reason as to why that person is “˜weird/broken/*insert derogatory descriptor here*’ and told from the point of view of an outsider with no empathy or understanding as to what they have gone through ““ a character backstory used to explain or excuse actions rather than feeding into the story.

Rarely do we hear the stories of those who are just trying to live with what has happened. Those with PTSD who are still healing. Those who can’t get justice or revenge or those who, for a myriad of reasons, choose not to, but still have to live with the consequences of what happened. Those who are still adapting to the changes forced on them, or the trauma that they have to live with every day.

Sexual violence is prevalent in both fiction and reality (1)(2), and while I’m grateful we have the #MeToo movement and increased visibility and voices in reality, we have a long way to go in addressing the long-term effects of sexual violence on a person. PTSD in sexual abuse survivors is also higher than the average population (3).

It is unfair of me to point fingers at books that get sexual violence “˜wrong’ or use it as a titillating teaser, so instead I’m going to share two books in the SF&F genre with realistic survivor reactions and ongoing PTSD/abuse aftermath that I really recommend.

DEERSKIN by Robin McKinley

As Princess Lissla Lissar reaches womanhood, it is clear to all the kingdom that in her beauty she is the image of her dead mother, the queen. But this likeness forces her to flee from her father’s lust and madness; and in the pain and horror of that flight she forgets who she is and what it is she flees from: forgets almost everything but the love and loyalty of her dog, Ash, who accompanies her. But a chance encounter on the road leads to a job in another king’s kennels, where the prince finds himself falling in love with the new kennel maid . . . and one day he tells her of a princess named Lissla Lissar, who had a dog named Ash.

The main character is sexually abused by her father near the beginning of the book, and the story shows her wrestling with this experience and learning to heal at her pace and in her own way.

A fantastic story with a clear message. You can survive sexual abuse. It will change you forever, but you can live despite that.

TENDER MORSELS by Margo Lanagan

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever””magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?

A mix of fairy tale and fantasy, but most definitely for adults, this novel explores Liga’s childhood and abuse at the hands of her father. It shows us rape, miscarriages, pregnancy and how Liga becomes an incredible mother, overcoming the violence of the children’s conceptions. Have I included spoilers? Not really. Her journey is the story. Harrowing, but wonderful in the way the prose gives us hope even through unrelenting darkness.

Both of these show childhood trauma and sexual abuse, which can be very different to adult sexual abuse (and, to a certain extent, domestic abuse). I really tried to think of some good, solid stories that focused on an adult journeying through sexual violence PTSD but came up short.  Recommendations warmly received!


When writing ANNA I wanted to not only tell the story of a victim who struggles to deal with PTSD while rebuilding relationships, but also show how the behavior and persona of a perpetrator changes with their audience, and how those who have been coercively controlled can still bend to their abuser, even months after the event.

ANNA is not a milquetoast trope of a victim. She is broken, beaten, abused, carrying her scars and trauma around with her, never letting her guard down. She struggles as survivors struggle every day, second-guessing everything and everyone but desperately yearning for a sense of normality. Through all of that she is strong, and she shows us her strength as the story progresses.

As a writer and a feminist I think it’s important to show a different view of survivors of sexual abuse in literature. I wanted to show her decision-making, her thought process and agency through those dark times and hopefully take the reader on the highs and lows of her recovery.

I’ve been asked why I didn’t make the novel a contemporary piece. Honestly? I love speculative and dystopian fiction. I didn’t want to write in the here and now when I work with this subject matter so often.

I stress that I’m no psychologist. I have a vested personal and professional interest in this area, and have followed and relied on experts in the field (4) to help form my characters and stories. It is not my place to tell a reader how a survivor will react to such trauma; every person is unique, their story and experiences different. My experience of something does not make me the arbitrator of all the possible responses and reactions, but I hope that what I have shown is that sexual abuse is not a trope. It is not glib, it is not something to use to merely push a story forward and add a “˜grim’ slant to a novel. It is harrowing and often the survivor is alone, even when surrounded by people who love them, with a long journey to recovery.

But the journey of a survivor is not all doom and gloom. There is hope. There are moments of love, of pure happiness and joy, of friendship and trust, but it’s not easy. Strength comes in many forms.

ANNA is a book that stands witness to the experiences of so many survivors and although that makes it an uncomfortable read at times, it is an offering to and reflection of the people who struggle with these issues.

I refuse to make a spectacle of sexual trauma, and I hope that I’ve done justice to the hundreds of survivors I’ve spoken with during my 15 years in the field of domestic and sexual abuse.

I said that we can do better, but when we see how the world really is, we know deep down that we must do better.


  1. https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence
  2. https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/about-sexual-violence/statistics-sexual-violence/
  3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2323517/
  4. http://www.zoelodrick.co.uk/training/article-1

BIO: Sammy H.K Smith lives and works in Oxfordshire UK as a police detective. When not working she spends time with her children, husband and pets, renovates her house, and inadvertently kills plants. A keen writer and lover of all things science fiction and fantasy, she’s often found balancing a book, a laptop, a child, and a cat whilst watching Netflix.

Learn more about Anna and buy the book here.


If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

This was a guest blog post.
Interested in blogging here?

Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?

Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines.

Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.

Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.

I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:

  • Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
  • Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
  • Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
  • A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
  • Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
  • Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
  • F&SF volunteer efforts you work with

Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.

When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)

Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.

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Guest Post from John Johnston III: Fictional Characters

rene magritte
Leaving the character as an essentially blank canvas to be filled in later by what the character does is far more effective than actually going into detail about them.
It’s an aphorism that great fiction requires a great plot, but it also requires great characters. But what are great characters, and how do you create them?

To begin with, great characters must seem real: not superheroes, not perfect, not omnipotent and certainly not omniscient. Sometimes they make a wrong decision. Sometimes they’re afraid or even petty. Sometimes they do stupid things. My own favorite character has a very serious problem with authority. Good characters, like real people, have flaws, and may even have serious or crippling ones. If your characters do have such flaws they will have an appeal to your reader that no heroic cardboard paladin could ever match. Readers have even been known to fall in love with tragically flawed characters.

Great characters have their own complex motivations. Even in fantasy tales of good versus evil, every significant character needs to have their own motivation for what they are doing. Whether it is love, duty, hate, revenge, lust, greed or atonement, the reader needs to know just what it is that motivates the character to do what they are doing. Whether told by backstory or brought out via conversation, each significant character’s motivation should be exposed in order to make them more interesting to the reader, and to get the reader more involved in the plot through the characters. Along with having their own motivation, every significant character should be in pursuit of something – victory, success, escape, money, fame, freedom or even just their next meal – and the reader should know what it is.

Great characters are not described in detail. Certainly the character’s general appearance and nature should be presented; but the details of the character should be spelled out by the character itself in the character’s motivations, actions and dialogue. Leaving the character as an essentially blank canvas to be filled in later by what the character does is far more effective than actually going into detail about them. Additionally, any details deliberately left out by the writer will be automatically filled in by the imagination of the reader, thus making for a more personal and more enjoyable reading experience. A writer can even use the sudden exposure of a previously-undisclosed facet of a character as an effective plot device.

Now that as an author you have created some great, human, flawed, motivated characters, what do you do with them? You ruin their lives. You do that by menacing or hurting them or someone (or something) they love, by putting them in harm’s way, by tormenting them, by making them suffer. Why? So the reader can see who they really are. As Dwight Moody famously said, “Character is what you are in the dark,” and when things are darkest for your characters is when the reader learns the most about them. Failure also helps with character development: how someone deals with failure is far more telling about them than how they deal with success ever is, both in fiction and in real life.

And, last but not least, have at least one character for everyone to sympathize with. By this I don’t necessarily mean to try to present one character in a way that is sympathetic to everyone; what I mean here is that given the totality of human nature, try to have enough variation in the characters that at least one of will be able to appeal to a reader no matter what the reader’s nature, worldview, philosophy, politics, or sexuality are. Yes, this is an argument for diversity in characters, but it’s not a political argument: there are readers out there of all types, and as a writer who wants to succeed you want your fiction to appeal to all of them, or as least as many as you possibly can.

Great characters make great fiction, so be sure to make great characters.

Bio: John Johnston III is a scientist, a fiction and non-fiction writer, a board vice chairman, a university faculty member, a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (as well as the chair of its Grievance Committee and a recipient of its highest honor), a lifelong baseball fan, a patriot, and a political independent. He thinks that personal websites are even more vain than requested bios and refuses to have one.

Want to write your own guest post? Here’s the guidelines.
#sfwapro

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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Guest Post from Pete Sutton: On Crowdfunding North by Southwest

Cover of north by southwest
In February 2014, at a North Bristol Writers meeting I said “We should write an anthology!” which was greeted by enthusiasm by all present. Writing the stories was the “˜easy’ part; how would we get it published?
In 2014 The North Bristol Writers created an anthology and successfully funded it via Fundsurfer. The book is now available to buy in eBook and paperback from Tangent Books & Amazon worldwide.

North by Southwest is an anthology by ten writers. The tales are mainly set in Bristol and are an eclectic and unlikely series of journeys through landscape and story. These are all new stories, never before published, and show great variety. Here lies the strength of the book, showcasing as it does the work of the writers after a year or so of collaboration.

Bristol is a vibrant, creative city and the tales here are infused with that energy. Bristol has had such a great effect on transport through the ages ““ it’s an airplane city, a railway city, and a port city ““ so naturally such themes recur, as does the theme of “˜North’.

***

In February 2014, at a North Bristol Writers meeting I said, “We should write an anthology!” which was greeted by enthusiasm by all present. Writing the stories was the “˜easy’ part; how would we get it published?

A few friends had run successful Kickstarters and we toyed with the idea of crowdfunding but weren’t sure how to start. Then I had a chance meeting at a reading evening (the much missed Small Stories) with another writer ““ Amy Morse http://www.amymorse.co.uk/ who had just successfully funded her novel Solomon’s Secrets via a funding platform I’d not heard of ““ Fundsurfer, which is a Bristol based crowdfunding platform, very similar to Indiegogo and Kickstarter. I invited Amy along to a North Bristol Writers meeting to talk about her experience and after her talk we determined to use Fundsurfer. Mainly because Fundsurfer was local and the stories were mostly set locally.

Christmas Steps by Pete Sutton. Art by Claire M Hutt
Christmas Steps by Pete Sutton. Art by Claire M Hutt
We got on with writing the stories and recruiting local artist Claire M Hutt to do the cover and illustrations. Claire was a key addition as we could use her art for pledge rewards. I had a couple of meetings with the Fundsurfer guys, who were super helpful and also with local publisher Tangent who were going to facilitate the publishing process.

We budgeted for Typesetting, Design, Printing and postage & packing then set up the Fundsurfer page. The most difficult bit was making the video, no-one in the group had any experience of making videos. We recorded a few hours of footage and in the end I only used the audio from it.

We launched the Fundsurfer at the end of October 2014 at BristolCon, who very generously donated several sets of tickets for the 2015 Con that we could use for pledge rewards, and set it to run for until mid-December.

Friends who’d had successful crowdfunding campaigns gave some great advice. The best piece of advice was “build the crowd, then the funding” so we had spent a while telling everyone we could think of that the book existed and needed funding. So that when we launched the Fundsurfer campaign a lot of people already knew about it.

I’ve mentioned a couple of rewards already and obviously the rewards and the levels are key to the success of the project. We started with a long list of about fifteen rewards but with the advice of “˜less is more’ from the Fundsurfer guys we whittled them down to seven. Apparently it’s like the way people choose wine, some will go for the bargain basement (but in fact we had very few go for the lowest reward level) some will go for the mid-range and some will go for the top range. The majority of people will go for the mid-range. So having a range of rewards is more important than having a variety of awards. We budgeted for a certain number of physical copies and worked out the likely number for P&P. P&P kills many crowdfunding campaigns & is something you need to give careful consideration to!

We got some nice publicity from Bristol 24/7 and a very entertaining “˜celebrity endorsement’ from local writer Jonathan L. Howard.

With 10 writers, an editor and an artist involved we thought that funding would work out if we could all get a few friends & family to pledge. It was still a nailbiting few weeks as the project slowly accumulated the funds; slower than I would have liked. We reached our funding goals a few days before the project was due to end and got pretty much what we asked for, getting just £62 over our goal.

Often it felt like all those times in school when you tried to get money out of people for doing a sponsored walk, or similar. We mainly sold it as a pre-order for the book, but potentially didn’t set expectations well enough, that once we had the funding the process of getting the book published would begin, and as we all know, everything in publishing takes a lot longer than you think. However the actual process has been very smooth, thanks to Tangent. All the funders have now received their eBook and the print book is imminent. We are looking to have a local launch and have started planning our next anthology.

Would I crowdfund again? It’s a very viable way to fund a project but it does rely totally on people’s goodwill and it is a lot of hard work. The amount of people who will “get round to it” is very large and there is an inevitable amount of nagging, which I didn’t like at all. However we were successful and it was the most equitable way of creating the book.

Pete SuttonBio: Pete Sutton is a UK writer and blogger, one of the organisers of Bristol Festival of Literature and contributing editor to Far Horizons magazine . He is a contributor to the Naked Guide to Bristol and you can read his latest published story ““ The body in the lake in Fossil Lake 2 published by Sabledrake Enterprises.
Follow him on Twitter as @Suttope and read his blog here: http://brsbkblog.blogspot.co.uk/ & his website here: http://petewsutton.com/.

Want to write your own guest post? Here’s the guidelines.

#sfwapro

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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