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.