I’ve written before about how I strive to hit emotional highs and lows, and I do. But ideas, not feelings, are what keep me writing (and reading).
I sit down to write a new story because I have some itching thought that I can’t work out any other way. I unspool the plot until my ideas become clear, writing to explore, to argue, to see the nuance in something I thought I understood. There are no easy answers in life, and if you read my stories and think I’m saying that there are, then I have failed you.
I’m often reacting to older stories, even classics, and my creations reflect that through the most funhouse of mirrors.
Often, I set out to reimagine a tale I’ve encountered and found wanting. Hopefully, by the time my story is fully fleshed out, the source material has receded so far into the background that none but the most dedicated literary archaeologist could uncover it. At times, I myself forget where I started.
Too often, it seems, these reactions I need to explore center on furthering a half-hearted feminist message in something I read. There is no longer any need for simplistic feminist messages, the way there was even a mere decade or two ago. With a woman vice president and women ascendant around the world, “girls doing things” isn’t (shouldn’t be!) radical anymore. Passive diversity in every other way, too, can’t get us where we need to go, and it’s tragic that we ever thought it could.
In my stories, I want to portray a complex message. I want to show women and girls struggling in a world that is in many ways silently against them; I want to show their difficulties but also their power. I don’t want to rely on male saviors (or white saviors!) but I don’t want to depict a world in which there is no role for the historically dominant to play. It’s difficult to navigate the world, no matter who you are.
One of my projects (far from publication at this point) is a romance-free retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I wanted to explore redemption without romantic love and show that friendship — or even just shared humanity — should be enough to make us save each other. I thought I had a powerful arc for the female main character, who, as in the classic story, is trapped in a castle with a cursed prince and must free them both. The curse, in this telling, came as a result of the prince’s failures, and so he had to learn from his past. I thought I’d found a great ending that allowed her to go free and him to return to a semblance of his old life, forcing him to grow as a person. But the first beta reader I sent this to, a trusted friend, was horrified by the ending — in her reading, it rewarded the prince and minimized the efforts of the girl who carried the entire story!
What I had imagined as a profoundly feminist, independent protagonist seemed to my friend to be as regressive as the original fairytale.
In my revisions, I didn’t change what happened to the characters in the end, but I went to great pains throughout the earlier chapters to show that these particular endings would match the characters’ own goals and dreams. The opportunity to try again at life would be appropriately read as a punishment for the male lead, and the perceived punishment for the girl would be seen instead as the triumph I had intended.
I’ve realized that the supposedly feminist messages of the YA books I read as a child appear to me now to be denigrating. The girls had to behave like boys to be seen as strong. They fought and triumphed and won but still had little agency. Falling in love ended up incredibly important in these stories, but only for the girls, not the boys they fell for.
These critiques are not original, but I have to keep them in mind while writing. I still love those books, even if the message they send grates on me, and I read them a formative time. They’re in me, and I have to make a point not to carry forward ideas I do not want to espouse by accident.
It’s all too easy to imply the wrong things in a story.