Girls With Short Hair

I've been trying to do this sort of post for a while, but I haven't. I think, deep down, I have a lot to say about it, and a lot of it is reactionary. I've reacted to angry things being said about women and girls who have pixie cuts. That being said, this is partly going to be reactionary, and partly going to be Wild Card's Five Reasons Why Having Short Hair Is Awesome.

Let's start with the angry part of me. There's this article, which basically argues that 100% of people who identify as women would look much better with long hair, because "long hair's almost universally attractive to men." What the author fails to realize, however, is sometimes women don't want to be attractive to men. Earlier in that article, there's a dialogue box where he's speaking to a woman who had recently gone pixie. She said that she had about 90% fewer men hitting on her; he acted like this proved his point that she was not attractive. Though he included the rest of her sentence in the article, he seemed to brush it aside: she said that the reduced male attention is partially why she did the thing. (OMG! PEOPLE DON'T WANT MALE ATTENTION ALL THE TIME? WHAT A RADICAL CONCEPT!) This author seems to dislike short-haired women specifically because he has had negative experiences with them - the only short-haired woman he dated was into kinks that he found repulsive. (And somehow that applies to all of us? I can verify that is not the case). Apparently, I am also signaling that I am damaged beyond repair as I sit here with my super-short hair, but he doesn't say how. I'd like to know, because I'd like to see if I can fix myself: partly because I don't like being broken, and partly because I'd love the challenge.

On the whole, I don't think many men are as blatantly misogynistic as the writer seems to be (and, I might add, the rest of the website seems to be). There's a definite feminine factor to long hair; personally, that's just not for me. I know my boyfriend would prefer it if I had kept my hair longer, but he also knows that he doesn't have enough power over my body to make me grow it out. As personal preference, I like having short hair. Having had long hair, I felt like it was a big hassle to have hair everywhere, and I never really cared about making my hair look pretty, so it wasn't worth keeping it long.

But here's Wild Card's List of Reasons Short Hair Can Work For Women:

1. The right cut can frame your face really well.
The most striking example I thought of was this photo of Audrey Hepburn from the article I mentioned earlier:

LOOK AT HER JAWLINE. LOOK AT HER CHEEKBONES. SHE HAS A FACE. SHE IS PRETTY BECAUSE OF BONE STRUCTURE. THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY.

Sure, unflattering cuts happen all the time, but that's not exclusive to short hair.

2. If you're into makeup/ earrings/ jewelry/ etc, you can show it off better.
I mean, now that we can see your face, ears, and collarbone, you can better notice all the stuff you choose to do/ not do with those areas.

3.  It's fairly practical.
I'm fairly outdoorsy and I go running regularly. Though it's easy to pull my hair into a ponytail, it's easier to do absolutely nothing. Also, the right cut is versatile, just as long hair can be. You can tie long hair back, yes, but you can't spike long hair up, or anything like that. And it's just as easy to do absolutely nothing and still look fine. Not to mention that I can make a single bottle of shampoo last an entire semester; with anything longer than a pixie cut, a huge bottle could only last me two months or so.

4. SUMMER WEATHER.
Here meaning that, in the humid areas where I live, having hair to my waist was less of me saying "I'M A FEMININE MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT" and more of me saying "MY HAIR IS SWEATY AND GROSS AND I WANT TO BRAID IT OR DO SOMETHING BUT I CAN'T BECAUSE IT'S STICKING TOGETHER AND I ALREADY SHOWERED TODAY AND THE REST OF ME FEELS FINE BUT MY HAIR IS NASTY." Also, it's an extra layer of heat, which is not fun when the weather approaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit, plus humidity.

5. 'Short' is a broad term that's easy to define personally.
As already stated, I had long hair in middle school - hair to my waist, to be precise. This is partly (well, mostly) because I didn't cut my hair through all of middle school. Then I donated 10 inches to Locks of Love. My hair was 'short,' and it just brushed my collarbone. The following summer, my hair was still 'short,' but it was shorter than my collarbone and layered a bit. Now, my hair is still 'short,' but that means the longest bits are at the top of my head; those bits are only an inch or two long. 'Short' can also mean bobs, or varying lengths of pixie cuts or pageboys or anything from the collarbone to the roots. It all depends on what works.


If a woman were to ask me whether she should cut her hair, I would say yes. Why? It's one of those things that should be tried once in one's life, like running some super-long distance or going somewhere you never though you could go. Short can easily be definable as "long-ish layers" or "longer bob;" it doesn't have to be a pixie cut or a fauxhawk or one of those styles with really long bangs and half the head shaved. And if you don't like it, be patient and grow it out. Learning to deal with not-fun things is an important part of life.

On Grittiness

Earlier this week, my boyfriend suggested an article for me to read (you can read it here); it was by an author that neither of us had read, but my boyfriend is intending to.  The article deals with grittiness in fantasy, and, from what I read, I quite like his point - that getting into the gross, honest, painful details of the story is one of the best ways to make the tale compelling.  I do like, however, that he notes that including gory details of death scenes isn't always necessary, but those scenes should be included if that is what drives the story - the fights, the deaths, the moral ambiguity, the pain of doing unpleasant things.

I think that America in general, especially in politics, is starting to get rather polarized - black and white, good and bad, they're-not-my-party-so-they're-an-unenlightened-moron kind of deal.  I'd like to use more grittiness, but, to be quite frank, none of my writing demands gory death scenes.

What all stories demand, though, is honesty.  Telling things like they are.  Though there is some sort of poetic way to imply some things without saying, "That night, these two characters had passionate sex, and it was great," I do think that you should only use implications if the words that would have been said in the scene don't directly forward the story - if it isn't critical that someone's self-esteem is built or broken in bed, then the scene should simply be, "THEN THEY HAD SEX," and then cut to the next morning.

I believe honesty is necessary in fiction, but sometimes honesty and straightforwardness can be simply boiled down to someone saying that the sex was great last night.

On Openings

I just returned from Barnes and Noble, and I have discovered my new favorite opening line, from a Steampunk novel called The Friday Society, by Adrienne Kress:
"And then there was an explosion."
First off, this is a great use of in media res. Explosions don't happen on a daily basis in many places, so you start with a question of what the hell is going on.
Then it continues:
"It was loud. It was bright. It was very explosion-y."
That bit sets the tone for the rest of the story (or at least, for the page and a half that I have read) - for what I have read so far of The Friday Society, the 3rd person narrator is rather sarcastic and witty, and keeps up a similar narration to what has just been displayed, even if it only involves the development of the focus character, who caused the explosion (it wasn't on purpose, but... she's a lab assistant in a Steampunk universe; explosions are bound to happen).

A good opening, my friends, is more important than a good closing.  Why?  If you don't have a good opening, your readers are never going to make it to the end, so you will never know whether the readers will celebrate a good end to a good book, or complain of a terrible end to a decent book.  They're not even going to make it to the middle bits, even if the middle bits are of a higher caliber than the ending or the beginning.  Though it is important to develop every part of your writing, and to edit (which, unfortunately, I have displayed a severe lack in the writing of this blog), open your book well.

Writing Style

I have been mentioning this topic for a while, so it is time I do a post on it.

Obviously, writing style is important. A distinction should be made, however, between writing style and grammatical correctness:  Like a Tide Laundry Detergent commercial mentioned, "Style is an option; clean is not."
Similarly, WRITING STYLE is something that differs depending on who you read, because everyone's voice is different; even if Barnes and Noble classifies an author under specific genres or styles, the Vampire Kisses series is not written in the same style as the Twilight series, though they are both vampire romance novels.
However, GRAMMATICAL CORRECTNESS is ALWAYS MANDATORY, unless you are writing a fan-fiction that you intend to be a bad thing on the Internet.  Grammatical correctness needs to be a requirement for any published novel or story, regardless of whether or not it was self-published.  Small things that are easily overlooked are excusable if they are few and far between; constant misuse of words and/ or misspellings SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED.  Do not rely entirely on your computer's Spell Check, because it can be faulty - sometimes it will tell you to switch around a word or two that may affect the meaning.
I would like to point out that the phrase "I'm just a bad speller" is never an excuse.  If you ask your friends to read and edit your writing (make sure your friend is an English major or at least has some interest in literary quality), you can easily catch any errors.  Additionally, though you should BE AWARE of Spell Check, that does not mean it is your enemy.  Though it can be annoying at times and sometimes it can be wrong, it is frequently correct, and you should note when it is telling you something.

Writing style in and of itself is something that can be interesting to study.  Though it is not entirely the same thing as a writer's voice, the two are very similar.  The writer's voice is how you hear the narration as you read it; the writer's style is how the author writes it.  Style can be genre-specific (but not always), whereas voice is always subjective.

Really the only way to improve your voice and figure out what sort of style you want to use (even if it's one of your own invention) is to practice.  So go forth and write! :)

Personal Style

There are two sorts of style when you write fiction: your style and the characters' style.  I can't really dictate the former, unless it involves "don't screw with your sentence structure and remember to proofread and spell-check," but it is possible to offer some advice on the latter.

Like people who are not in books, what you wear is often a part of who you are.  I, for example, wear jeans and a t-shirt every day; I only wear dresses if I have to go to something snazzy or if all my shirts are dirty, and I normally only wear one of the four dresses I brought (because it has POCKETS, which are the greatest invention ever, right behind Moose Tracks FroYo and bookstores).  This could either read "college student" (which would be completely correct) or "reasonably practical" (which I hope is correct).  If you work in high fashion and have to wear dresses and heels and need an hour in the mirror every morning, you could also view my jeans and lack of eyeliner as "lazy."  That's your choice.  I do not see myself in any situation where such effort is demanded of my personal appearance.

Similarly, the characters that have been written, both by myself and by others, also demonstrate themselves through their style.  I once wrote a character that was a knight.  There was a very good reason (her personal comfort and practicality for career choice) that she did not wear skirts and carry a purse everywhere.  First off, what knight wears a skirt?  Second off, you can't KEEP anything in a purse, especially if you're a knight.  Because she has spent so much time around guys (read: HER ENTIRE LIFE), she is not horribly in touch with her femininity and dresses pretty much like the guys do, both on holiday and in school (and in the adventure, because she has nothing else to wear and doesn't really mind it).

I know it sounds superfluous, but it actually does matter.  If you are writing a character where the difference between heels and flats is not going to make a difference in their career, then think about what else they would do: if they wear heels, fine.  If they don't, that's cool too.  If they show up to work in their beat-up hi-tops because they can, that's fine (I don't think too many jobs would actually let you do that, but it's your choice).