Strength and Heroines

For a long goddamn time, women did not get their due in life or in literature. Damsels in distress abounded. Oppression was (and still is today to varying degrees) a real problem.

In the past few years, there have been quite a few stories that have heroines who do more than fall in love with the hero and get themselves into trouble. Which, don't get me wrong, is a great thing. The Hunger Games, Divergent, Game of Thrones, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are just a few. Each of these has a female character who plays a major role and breaks the damsel in distress stereotype. They are strong female characters.

But it seems to me (that means this is MY OPINION which I am entitled to just as you are entitled to yours) that this is not the best way to describe female characters.

What makes a character strong? Do I mean 'strong' as in physically, mentally, emotionally, or written well? 

Good characters, again in my opinion, do not necessarily have to be 'strong' in any way except that they are written well. When it comes to female characters especially, it is difficult to have them fail at anything (physically, mentally, emotionally) because then the writer runs the risk of having them appear 'weak'. And that is not something people are in the mood to accept about a female character right now.

Real people aren't always 'strong'. They aren't able to continuously defy expectations with their physical strength. They don't always have the answer right away. They break down and cry when terrible things happen.

Before a character is strong, they should be believable. We should be able to look at them, imagine them, and relate to them. We should root for them even when they fail, we should cry when they cry. We should feel for them before we admire them for their strength.

My character does not have her shit together. She's seventeen. What seventeen year old actually has their shit together? How many adults really have their shit together? 

She's smart but she has to think and she makes mistakes. Lord, does she make mistakes. She has a heart that can be and has been and will be broken. She will fall down and she will fail and I am not afraid for her. 

I will also not describe her as being strong. She is brave and she is selfish and she is afraid and she is selfless and she is generous and she is uncertain of herself. Tell me if you haven't been every one of those things. 

Her strength is not the absence of weakness and the darker places in her heart but rather her ability to keep in the lighter places in spite of the darkness.

Backwards

There was a time when the thought of completely restarting a story would have made me cry and give up. It is kind of sad to know I've written twenty pages and probably won't use any of them. But the story has changed.

So I am choosing to look at it as a rather long character development that I did backwards. By backwards, I mean that I wrote about who my character would be after the events of the story it turns out I am going to write. 

Fascinating, I know. But it can be useful to imagine who you want a character to be years after the story ends because it can tell you how they are in the story and how they need to change. And stories are about the opportunity to change or to take action. Even if they choose not to act, the character can't be the same at the beginning as they are at the end. 

My character (and this is very secret writer thinking) will be calm, collected and in control seven years after the end of the main story. So for her to be able to become that, she stars off as uncertain and a little afraid. 

Some of you are probably wondering why on earth I've named two traits that could bring to mind weakness (and if you hadn't, I just handed it to you on a silver platter). 'Strong female characters' are very popular right now and I think my character is amazing. I have very firm ideas about the nature of strength and characters in general, so I plan on addressing this in a blog all its own.

Okay, enough for now. I am very sure this is only interesting to me and other writers. 

I Don't Believe in Soul Mates

I don't believe in soul mates. 

Imagine that there was really only one other person on the planet for you. There are roughly seven billion people alive today. Most of us prefer one gender over the other, so that leaves 3.5 billion people we could be attracted to. And that's just of the people who are alive. What if your soul mate died a year ago and  you never met them? Or what if you or your soul mate can't ever afford to leave the country you were born in and so you never meet each other because of that? 

And how do you know if someone is your soul mate? Popular TV, movies, even some books, would have us believe that first love is the be all end all of existence. Usually it's not. But say you marry someone and then find your soul mate. Does that negate the love you feel towards the person you married? I hope not. 

The problem I have with the concept of soul mates is that it implies there is one way and only one way to find someone you can love and commit to and go through life with. 

I loved writing The Stupid Book. I loved my two main characters, I loved the world I got to build for them. I did. But last week, I stopped working on it because a new story with a new character popped into my head. And I couldn't ignore her. 

I don't know if I will ever circle back and try to get The Stupid Book published. But I love it and it taught me something about writing and about myself. I don't know if this new story will become a book at all, let alone one I feel ready to publish. 

I hope I write more than one story worth publishing but I know I'd be lucky to publish one. Maybe this new story is the story, the one I want to give the rest of the world a chance to read. I don't know. 

I do know that even if it is, it won't be the last book I write, let alone the last story I love. But I love it already, like I love The Stupid Book, like I love my Butterflies stories, like I love my Elemental stories 

Like I said, I don't believe in soul mates. Not even when it comes to books.

A Couple Things

I can't say I've been thinking a lot about writing the past few days, what with moving in at school, being sick, and actually going back to school. 

Being back with friends I haven't seen in three months has given me the opportunity to show off my printed book. You should see their faces when I tell them how long it is, or even when they just see it. It gives me no small amount of satisfaction. 

Is this because I like showing off? Probably a little bit but more of it has to do with the fact that until now, people just had to take my word that I was capable of writing that much. Now I have proof. This is my talent. I was not making it up. 

In other news, I have decided that the official working title will be "The Stupid Book" until such time as I can actually think of a title. I have a couple titles for sequels bouncing around in my head but that doesn't do this book much good. 

A couple of other things I feel like divulging about The Stupid Book: it is fantasy, it is written in limited third person and the perspective is split between two characters. 

That is all. Survive going back to school. I feel your pain. 

Some Character Thoughts...

So, I was listening to "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from the Mulan soundtrack and it got me to thinking about all of the female characters, both in books and movies, that influenced me. I don't mean as role models (because let's be honest, characters don't always make the greatest role models. Just look at Juliet) but as a writer. This is my personal list. Emphasis added so no one gets in a huff about who I haven't included. Also, these have a few (vague) spoilers. You have been warned.

5. Mulan. First of all, she's a Disney princess who is not actually a princess. By the end of the movie, she's the hero of China. She was motivated by love of her father to join the army in his place, which is awesome and refreshing in that a lot of women seem to be motivated by romantic love. The downside, though, is that she spends most of the movie pretending to be a man and earns respect that way.

4. Hazel Grace from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. (I hope that is enough of a citation. If not, I apologize.) She has cancer but she's still funny and smart. Which I love, given that so much of the plot deals with death. John Green is amazing and I'd probably lose the ability to speak coherently if I ever met him. And then ask him why he is so good at making people cry.

3. Elsa, from Frozen. I know, I know, people need to shut up about Frozen. I'm not sorry. Elsa spends most of her life terrified that she is going to kill someone and then once she's free, she's able to take control of her powers and be herself. I can't get over what it must have been like to be her, growing up, afraid of touching anyone or anything. It must have been incredibly lonely and then to find freedom in being alone. But she's not a typical 'strong female character' in that she still needs Anna's help in fixing the winter. Talk about character development. Oh, and she's a queen for most of the movie. 

2. Hermione, from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter books were the first real books that I read on my own. I even wrote my senior paper in high school on the theme of fate presented in them. But Hermione is smarter than Harry and Ron, which definitely made it easy for me to think of girls as smart. But she's also got a really big heart and doesn't sit by when the three of them get into fights.She's not perfect, which makes her human, which is the best thing that anyone (in my humble opinion) can say about any character. Love her.

1. Liesel Meminger from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. If you haven't read this book, get it and read it now. It is amazing. I don't even know where to begin with Liesel. She ages well in the book, she makes mistakes and learns from them, and feels like a best friend. Of course, given that The Book Thief is my favorite book, she might just be on this list because it is impossible to separate her from the rest of what I love about the story and the writing. 

Now, I am not implying that I was not equally influenced by male characters, because I was. Maybe I'll write about them later. But all of my narrators and main characters have been female and I suspect they will continue to be. Not because I don't think guys are awesome but because I don't think I could accurately capture a guy's voice or how they interact with the world, seeing as I am a girl. But maybe one day.

Ode to the Coffee Shop

August is a hard time for me to write. It is the hottest month of the year where I live. Often, it is accompanied by a smoke fueled inversion in the valley, which makes breathing a gross activity. I hate writing when I am hot (my mom hates to be hot almost more than anything else, so I suspect this is a watered down version of that) and I hate that everywhere I go, it's really freaking bright. Which means glare. So I have to wait till it gets dark to tolerate sitting at my computer and then I have to go to bed because work in the morning.

But I need to learn to deal with these things, so I went to a local coffee shop this morning to work on my story (still untitled. Frustration levels are at maximum on that front). Rembrandt's, on Eagle Road. It's wonderful. Anyway, it got me to thinking about how amazing coffee shops are. So here is a  list of the reasons I personally love coffee shops.

1. They have coffee. Lots of it. That I don't have to make. That they make into a latte with a pretty heart pattern in the foam.
2. It requires extra clicking to get on the Internet, so I can easily convince myself that I can't get on the Internet. Which means I stay in Word. Open Word document=writing.
3. They have really cool tables and chairs. For conversation, they usually have some really comfy couches and chairs. For actual work, there are tables with enough space for a computer, a mug, and maybe a stack of papers.
4. White noise. Other people chatting and enjoying themselves is the perfect backdrop to whatever I have blasting in my headphones. It's amazingly helpful.
5. Having made the trip to a place with the specific intention of writing, I actually write. For quite a long time. This is of course helped by the consumption of caffeine.
6. Coffee shops are super cool. It's just a universal truth. People who sit in coffee shops tapping away on computers are cool. So when I am doing it, I feel cool. Which is nice.
7. They have cool art to look at when I need a break. You can also people watch, but it's creepier to do that when you have a computer, because you are obviously supposed to be looking at you.
8. Mostly though, it's the coffee. Coffee is wonderful. Yes, I know I have a problem but give me some credit. I only had one latte. That, my friends, is self-control. Well, that and not wanting to spend the money.

All in all, it was a pretty good morning.

Writer's Block Type: Avoidance

Many, many things have been written about writer's block. Some claim it does not exist, it just a nicer name for laziness. Others claim it is very real and spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to cure it. I find both of these ideas amusing because the solution is the same: START. WRITING. NOW.

Which is, of course, easier said than done. 

I am of the opinion that writing every day is not necessary (but then I haven't been published, so what the hell do I know) Well, I know that some days writing just has to wait because I have to go to class or study for a test or go to work folding bills to stuff into envelopes. Occasionally, it's for something slightly more fun (ie camping, going up to Table Rock, seeing a movie). But the point is, not writing every day is not the crime some people would have you believe it is. 

But lately, I've been doing everything in my power to avoid sitting down to work on my story (still untitled, which is endlessly frustrating to me). The operative word is that I have been avoiding it. My particular brand of writer's block is avoidance. 

It's not that I don't know what I want to write, or what I want to fix in my story. I have certainly spent a lot of time thinking about my characters and my plot. But I am having trouble with that whole 'sit your ass down and actually type words' bit.

I admit, it might be out of laziness. It is much easier to watch reruns of Sex and the City than it is to figure out how to redo dialogue. But really, if I am being honest with myself, it is because I am afraid. 

Having figured out that is the reason behind my avoidance, I sat down this morning and finished rewriting the opening scene. Is it great? No. Is it better than the original? Oh, dear God, yes. 

http://saraflower.wordpress.com/tag/writing-memes-writer-memes/

I found this amusing, because it's kind of the opposite of my problem. My imaginary friends never shut up....is that a problem?