[The Saucepan Man]

The enchanting thing with fantasy is that you are the creator of a world, and you are also the one who sets the rules for that world. (Child)

As the creator of a world, you may make your society what you wish it to be, which is something I very much enjoy doing. Not necessarily giving men a subservient role, but making the two genders equal--TRULY equal--and describing what comes of it. (Bethelarien)

Might this depend somewhat on the skill of the writer, though? Although not a writer myself, I was wondering whether it might be more difficult, and require greater skill on the part of the writer, credibly to portray a world where people's qualities and relationships are significantly different from those which we experience in real life. Then again, in many ways, I would think that it is easier to write a credible story set in a fantasy world than one set in the real world, since one does not have to worry about getting all those 'little details' right, as long as it is internally consistent.

Fordim's post raises a similar issue. He said:

So far I’ve changed race (one Hobbit, two Men, an Elf and a Dwarf) and the characters have all been fairly different from one another, but I’ve not yet crossed genders … in this forum I feel the need to inhabit the male mind.

I suspect that it’s perhaps the interactive nature of the Downs. In my own (thankfully abandoned) novels, I had total control of the reality, and thus there were no surprises. But here there are lots of surprises, and I find it more like acting than writing – I have to ask myself frequently, “How would I react to this incident” and then work through from that to “How will my character react to that?” It’s probably a lot easier for me to get from A to B without having to contend with the gender line.

It's interesting that you feel more able to react in your mind to situations as an Elf or Dwarf than as a woman. I would have thought that you and I would have much more in common, in terms of our approach to life and likely reactions to situations, with female humans than with Elves or Dwarves of either gender. Is this perhaps because an alternative psyche which does not actually exist in our world is easier to inhabit than one which does? Then again, every person is different and, unless your character is a facsimile of yourself, you will surely frequently find yourself having to think how someone with different characteristics than yourself would react to a situation. Child's question about people writing characters older than themselves is an example.

Or perhaps it is easier to write Dwarves, Elves and Hobbits in a Middle-earth situation because Tolkien has given us much of the information that we need in his writings, whereas the mind of the opposite sex often remains a complete mystery to us, even to someone like me who has been happily married for a number of years.