Quote Originally Posted by Kiwi Stoker View Post
Robert Jordan ... admitted he didn't feel able to write female characters so hence no ladies in his first book of "The Wheel of Time" series. He said he was going to use his wife to help him write female characters.
That just strikes me as incredibly lazy. He only knows one woman? And rather than get to know a few of the other half of the world's population, as maybe just some kind of prerequisite to being a writer, he wants the only woman he knows to do his job for him?

Contrast that with this, from a recent interview with Max Gladstone:

When I’m writing a new character, especially in a fantasy, I try really hard to reject the idea that ol’ straight white normally-abled cis Max is the Default Norm Human. It’s just not true. I hard about who my characters are and what they could be, demographically speaking, and then build those character traits into the story.