October 23, 2006
She’s a Bitch
Spinning off Raine’s hero post from Friday and a comment left over at Lipstick Chronicles, which if you haven’t checked it out is one of my favorite blogs to visit, I’m going to talk about heroines.
Can a morally conflicted heroine sell books? I’ll be honest and say I like morally ambiguous characters (ie hooker with a heart of gold, reluctant vampire etc). Why? Because it’s more like real life. I guess ‘like real life’ and hookers and vampires and escapism and enjoyment don’t all mesh real well, but stick with me. We are morally ambiguous and for that matter, life is morally ambiguous, and by that I mean shades of grey not black and white.
I realize I may be the exception and not the rule since many people will emphatically state they read for escapism. Whereas I think I read for entertainment. Is there a difference? Yeah, but that’s another blog post :)
I tend to write heroines people can relate to. I like reading about heroines that feel like my neighbor down the street or a girl I went to school with. I read Whores on the Hill a while back and it was like reading a trainwreck (and it’s literary fiction which I don’t normally read) about teenagers who make a bunch of dubious choices but it was fascinating and I had to keep reading and I couldn’t look away. It was an exasperating exercise but I stuck with it to see how the writer pulled it off. Something I rarely do.
One of my all time favorite heroines is from Mary Kay Andrews’ Little Bitty Lies and in the book the heroine, whose husband leaves her high and dry with no money and a ton of debt, tries to fake his death to collect a very tiny insurance policy. Her best friend helps and it’s absolutely hysterical but it’s a morally ambiguous move.
My point? You don’t necessarily have to like a chracter but you have to be fascinated by them whether they’re a Catholic school girl smoking and having sex way too young or a woman faking her husband’s death because she’s broke and has NO job skills or whether she’s the bad girl with a heart of gold or a bisexual heroine who leads the hero down a path some might consider sexually depraved…Or whether you’re writing about a Peeping Thomasina :)
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You can see the video mentioned at LSC here, Malcolm Gladwell on predicting movie hits.
I don’t need to like a character to read/write her/him.
But some people say they need to. That bugs me. It’s just ‘wrong’ to me. :???:
I don’t have to like a character to read about them, either.
Ditto.
I don’t need to like them to read them. I DO need to find them interesting, or fascinating, or ‘different’–something. One of my favorite characters that I’ve plotted but not written (sob!) is a heroine who’s completely amoral, lacks scruples, conscience, ethics.
But she’s very, VERY good at being what she is, dammit, and THAT makes her FASCINATING.
Shades of gray, as you said. Absolutely.
I’m with ya on this too. I want to read interesting characters. In fact, I really didn’t like the narrator in White Oleander but I read it anyway…just to see what happened next. ;)