Girls with Gumption

As I've been rewriting TDS, I've been taking stock of my female characters. I'm pleased that, to a large degree, they're different people and don't fall into any sort of stereotype. Because girls are not stereotypical.

Erin, I think, is certainly not a typical heroine. While posting my first draft on Figment, I was pretty pleasantly surprised by readers' reactions to her. Honestly, I wondered if I should expect complaints along the lines of "she's not strong enough" or "she's too vulnerable". But overall, people seemed to like dipping into the mind of an atypical heroine, who, I believe, is a pretty normal girl.

This led me to a question--where are the feminine heroines? 

The standard YA heroine now (though I'm not sure I can classify TDS as YA, as it deals with a much older protagonist) is independent, aggressive, and confident. She needs no one. She's a Katniss, an Arya, an Alianne. She knows what she wants and is fearless about getting it.

And that is great. We need girls like that, because books should be about real characters. We need to show girls who can be leaders, who are tough and gutsy. However, not all girls are that. We can't embrace only this kind of heroine and say to girls, "This is what you must be to be a woman".

Why can't girls be real and brave and feminine all at the same time? Do we equate being womanly with being weak? A writer friend made the comment to me some months ago: "[A heroine] can wear a dress, but she can't enjoy it". She can lead a kingdom, but she can't yearn for a king at her side.

I know all sorts of girls--loud girls and quiet girls, girls who wear sweatpants and girls who prefer summer dresses but feel at home at a table of ten boys.

Shouldn't our heroines be like that?

They should be real girls--funny and girly and confused and vulnerable and hopeful and brave.

Ramblings on Condwiramurs and Lilla

Aside from Charles, I have very few characters based off of real people I know. Most of them are a mix of other characters I've read or experienced in movies. I do, however, want to confess that my shining star from the real world is Condwiramurs the kitten, who makes her appearance in Chapter Eight of The Default Sweater. And, like a middle school kid who writes love poems about their crush and pretends they're actually about someone else, I stuck her in. Because I'm completely smitten.

Meet Senior Cat, who lives under the lockers at my school and emerges in the afternoons to twine herself around people's legs. I go to a very small school--only twenty-seven people in my graduating class--and I have to say, everyone is smitten by Senior Cat. I mean really smitten. I mean feeding-her-the-lunch-meat-out-of-sandwiches smitten. Who couldn't be? Just look at her. Aww....

*Ahem*

For any literary buffs who want to call me out on the weird name, Condwiramurs comes from a medieval German legend about a knight, Parzival, who goes searching for the Holy Grail. Condwiramurs was the queen of a kingdom called Pelrapeire and Parzival's wife.

Just a side note.

ANYWAY, on another note, today the weather did one of its delicious mid-January swoops up to eighty degrees. The sun was bright and warm, the sky looked good enough to eat, and a tiny breeze looped through it all. Heaven. I got home, seized my chance to put on a summer dress before the weather plunges to forty again, and went outside to read in the sun.

Somehow or another, I got to thinking about my new project, Lilla & the Tower, which is a retelling of the Cinderella story. I've been wanting to post a couple more chapters of it, but Default Sweater is really flowing right now, so I'll hopefully get back to it in a day or two.

But writing about a heroine trapped inside a tower, without even a window to breathe out of, made me think today. With the weather so beautiful, I couldn't help but be a little disturbed. I was thinking about all the things that Lilla has never seen, starting with sunsets and ending with trees and animals. I was most discomfited at the thought of the sky. I live in central Texas, and the sky here is never halfhearted; it is bold with its sunset colors and even with its blues. It sparkles when the sun is bright. On days like today, it pulls my attention to it and I can't look away.

I'm starting to realize that Lilla's frustration of being stuck in her tower is much more than just going a little stir-crazy. I was amazed to think about all the things she's never done. She's never snapped a pine needle in half to smell it. She's never seen light reach through trees. She never got to do a hundred kid things, like jump in piles of leaves or go swimming in the summer or splash in puddles with her church clothes on. I'm feeling twice as sorry for Lilla as I did when I started writing. I think it's terrible of her father to keep her shut up like that, without even a window to lean out of and smell the air.

Come on, Savannah, you wrote the book.

Right. Sorry. But seriously, what do you do if you can't lean out a window and smell things?