Current Project: Golden Heart Entries
Status: Dreaded Synopsis
My students tonight are watching The Breakfast Club, one of my favorite all-time movies. Then, they'll select a main character to do a comparison/contrast essay with their own lives. I love the essays this generates because you get a chance to really see how people see themselves. Tell me about your current heroine. How are you similar? Different? Do you tend to write your idealized self or your polar opposite?
6 comments:
My current heroine- is an illegitimate child of a traveling actor and a Southern Debutante. Her mother retreated from the world after she was born. A grandfather who can't stand to look at her raised her. She has learned to blend into crowds and not make a scene, knows how to alter herself with clothing and makeup and is on her first assignment as a Pinkerton agent.
She can think quick to get out of situations, picks up dialects and languages quickly, watches people to mimic them. She, however, even with growing up in a hostile environment, believes the best of everyone. Is too naive at times and is always searching for the man who fathered her and took her mother away.
How am I like this character? I tend to blend into the wallpaper and enjoy watching people. I've found I can pick up dialects fast and learn languages if I am around it with frequency. I'm not quick to get out of situations. In fact, hours later I'll come up with something mediocre!
But we both have the can do attitude. Once a task is revealed we put are all into it.
Fun post, Wavy. I'm curious to see what others have to say.
Short and sassy, Wavy! And, btw, I LOVE The Breakfast Club. I can probably recite verbatum the dialogue from several key scenes. When the kids took turns picking a movie from the video library, my oldest always chose TBC to the tortured groans of her younger brother.
Well, this is a tough exercise because my main character is the hero. The heroine is more like his sidekick and borderline partner, though she's pretty ballsy. They lock horns constantly, and with good reason: they have the same goal with opposing ideas how to accomplish it. He had a crappy childhood, and she had one that dreams are made of, even though she was once a poor hillbilly growing up in the Kentucky Black Mountains. Her family was close and loving, but she was born with the burden of being an exorcist and tasked with preventing the fulfillment of her grandmother's prophecy for a demon apocolypse. She and I couldn't be more different.
Wavy, I am too stressed for time to do this exercise -- and yet, as I read Paty's and saw how much she knows about her heroine and then Karen, too, it made me think if I took the time to do this, I might discover some insights about my heroine, so here goes.
Her name is Faith and almost died in the last book when a foe of her best friend tried to kill her. She's been given some devastating news by her doctor as Faith adores children and she may not ever be able to have any of her own. She teaches school and since she lost her mother when she was very young, she empathizes with the hero's niece who has also just lost her parents. Faith is the kind of friend every woman dreams of having, loving and giving. She tries to see the best in people and probably cuts them too many breaks. For the first time in her twenty-seven years, she's living away from her hometown and trying to figure out what she'll do next with her life, perhaps mistakenly thinking that her family needs space from worrying about her.. And when the world starts to crumble, as it will in a chapter or two, she will discover an iron core she only briefly glimpsed when she was hurt. She will also discover the depths of her own passions about the people she cares for.
How am I like her? In so many ways, I am like all my female heroines. This is the sensibility I inhabit and to write a heroine who differs from me in a big way would be very difficult. You can change mannerisms and goals, but the very heart? I don't know.
As for differences, I am not as selfless as Faith, I am not as kind. I'm more independent in ways. As for other differences and similarities, I assume they will develop as the story unwinds.
Thanks, Wavy, it's a beginning.
Wow--you all had very powerful insights about your characters.
Alice, I particularly appreciated your taking the time to do the exercise. Your link between worldview/voice/character is a very important one to make--you really made me think.
My current WIP heroine is a 16 year old girl who goes to college two years early. This is somewhat similar to my own experiences, and she's probably more like me than other heroines but she's definitely her own person. She's very concerned with not drawing attention to herself, and really resents intrusions into her space. She's not a joiner at all. And probably the biggest difference from me is that she's not talkative :)
Thanks for playing!
Gosh, now I have to think. But this will make a good segue into working on my story.
Let's see, my heroine tries to herd her very zany and eccentric family somewhere into the normal zone. I was definitely born with double the number of responsibility genes as most people, but I've never laid claim to normal--whatever that is. However, my heroine does loosen up over the course of the story and I'm also trying to do that.
Each of my heroines usually has at least one of my traits that I like. However, in most ways they are also very different than I am and have a positive trait or two that I'm still working on.
Good exercise!
This may have been a short blog, but it certainly triggered a lot of thought on my part! I think it's inevitable that there's something of me in my heroine -- in all of my characters, actually. How much is in there is the question, though. I hope that each of my heroines are (or will be) different from each other as well, but I'm sure there will be traits that they end up having in common.
My current heroine is named Catherine "Cat" Champagne. Cat is 32 and has never been married, though she came very close once, only to have her heart broken. That's the reason why she's gun shy about getting involved with anyone. She lived away from home (out of the state) from the time she left for college at 18 until she moved back 9 months prior to the start of the story. She only visited her family a few times in the intervening years, due mostly to her rocky relationship with her mother. Her mother died in an accident two years ago and Cat harbors unacknowledged guilt over never having patched things up with her mother before she died. Her relationship with her father, on the other hand, is warm and close. They kept in touch by phone and email in the years Cat was away, talking often. She's currently living in the family home with her dad, for both personal and economic reasons. She has an older brother and a younger sister, both of whom live in CA, but far enough away from Sacramento for visits to be infrequent. She's lost contact with them, feeling as though they've become more strangers than family to her.
Cat is organized, smart and intuitive -- when it comes to other people, not so much when it comes to herself -- and she's also stubborn and afraid to trust, especially when it comes to her heart. She's a people person, but lets very few truly get close. She worked in "corporate America" out of college, but came to hate the politics and the restrictions of working for big companies. She dreamed of doing something personally fulfilling (hmmm, maybe we've got more in common than I thought) and worked up a business plan for her small business idea -- special event planner. When she decided to move back home, she quit her corporate job and used a chunk of her savings to go into business for herself. It's been rough, but rewarding. When her client is murdered and she ends up being the prime suspect, Cat faces the very real possibility of seeing her dreams destroyed. She refuses to let that happen (I did say she was stubborn) and will do whatever it takes to expose the real killer and clear her name.
The biggest similarity Cat and I share is that we both grew up in Fair Oaks, CA -- (Sacramento for most of you out there). Beyond that...well, I guess you could say that we're both stubborn and don't give up easily when we're faced with a problem. Our family backgrounds are very different -- I'm close to mine and never had the kind of problems Cat did with her mom. I'd also describe myself as analytical, whereas Cat is more intuitive.
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