why did I go into this line of work, again...?

[robling_t]

Still going around and around with the Proposed Story on the question of the validity of the Narrator's motivations, vis-a-vis agency and gender-roles. Currently the hangup is that she seems to have dropped her work on a big External Emergency to come home and deal with a smaller Domestic Emergency; the problem I'm having with this is that I know that that's the choice that would be organic to this character, but I'm not at all sure that there's a way to pull this off in-text that won't automatically read as "oh, Family Concerns snap their fingers and the woman chucks her life to come running".

Is there a way to present her two possible paths as equally valid choices, and also make it clear that the decision to prioritise the domestic crisis at this time isn't being driven by a desire to conform to a woman's "expected" role? The Narrator would be the first in line to call bullshit on the idea that her place is in the home, but at the same time she's faced with a situation there that she not only needs to but wants to deal with...

{sigh} How much do bricklayers make per hour, again?

Comments

[morgynleri]

If you're able to lay out her thought process on her decision, I would expect that it would make it clear she isn't being driven by a desire to conform to an expected role. What the reader gets out of it, on the other hand, may still not be what you intend, depending on the life experiences and attitude of the reader - and sometimes, it doesn't matter how clear you make the intentions and motivations of a character, because the reader wants to read into it whatever preconceived notion they have about how particular sorts of characters should behave.

[robling_t]

I guess I'm mostly worrying about keeping an eye on the "known unknowns", so to speak -- IE, how to write mindfully about a situation that's easy to slip into assumptions about. Readers will bring what they bring, but the more Unfortunate Implications I can try to head off before they make it in in the first place, the better. I think part of the task here is to make explicit that the domestic side of it is part of her overall plan for her life, one part, and that putting other matters on hold to deal with an acute crisis at home is actually in the overall service of her goals, because if her personal life isn't going the way she wants it to, then her professional life is going to be affected by that until she deals with the home situation; she's not abdicating her outside responsibilities, she's putting her own mask on first, so to speak. Which is a hard enough thing to manage in real life, come to think of it... ;)