I'd love to read your thoughts on how diversity of your heroines' traits impacts your characterization and your readers empathy with the heroines. Do you feel you have the chance to write two distinct characters to get wide appeal or do you still feel constrained to writing an "every woman" character and an "every women wants" character so as to interest the greatest chunk of audience?
Character-identification is definitely a strong force in how I develop my characters and shape the stories. But the specific nature differs from project to project. In retrospect, I think there's a direct correlation between how much I identify with a character and whether they get written as a viewpoint character. (It isn't absolute, but it's a strong correlation.)
I'd say about half the time both members of the romantic couple get viewpoint time. Part of this is that I have a stylistic preference for showing strong emotional and psychological experiences externally rather than internally, so alternating viewpoints gives me the change do show both of their reactions from someone else's point of view.
I'd have to do a serious analysis, but I'd definitely say that if a primary character doesn't get to be a viewpoint character, it's likely that I identify with her less. But sometimes it's simply that the story seems to call for a single point of view. For example, another of my half-written stories (that didn't get mentioned above) -- the one for which the cocktail-party synopsis is "Viking girl kidnaps Welsh princess!" -- the viewpoint character ("Welsh princess") is less in control of the action of the story and therefore makes a better observer/commenter on things, but also the gradual unveiling of the back-story of the second protagonist ("Viking girl") is a major part of the plot and it would be less natural to control that gradual unveiling if we were inside her head, rather than showing the backstory as our viewpoint character learns about it. But there's also an element that the Norse character falls more into the "needs to be tamed" role of the classic story arc, which works better as object than subject.
I try to make all my characters distinctive and individual, with a mix of positive traits and flaws, but I don't particularly aim to have their characteristics be strongly contrasting and complementary. (For one thing, it would get boring if I were basically writing the same couple over and over in different settings.) Overall, there's a slight tendency for one character to break gender norms more in terms of presentation and behavior, but I try to avoid ending up with every pairing boiling down to an obvious butch-femme contrast. So overall, while I don't identify with all my primary characters, I do use the doubled-opportunity for identification on a regular basis.
And not just doubled -- to some extent, I'm writing woman-centered stories in general, not just romantic-pair stories. There may be primary female characters available for identification purposes who aren't part of the main romance (or who have romantic entanglements but don't happen to be paired up at the end). For example, in my medievaloid alternate-world fantasy "Iultig's Dreams" (completed first draft, needs massive revision) there are three female main characters, all with very different backgrounds, personalities, and problems to solve. They are involved at different points in the story in two different romantic pairings (well, "pairings" at least -- it's complicated) but not as an adversarial "romantic triangle". Two are viewpoint characters; the third isn't, mostly because she undergoes less internal transformation over the course of the story. But she could easily be the character that some readers identify most strongly with.
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Part 1, 'cause evidently there's a length limit on comments
Date: 2011-02-16 09:31 pm (UTC)Character-identification is definitely a strong force in how I develop my characters and shape the stories. But the specific nature differs from project to project. In retrospect, I think there's a direct correlation between how much I identify with a character and whether they get written as a viewpoint character. (It isn't absolute, but it's a strong correlation.)
I'd say about half the time both members of the romantic couple get viewpoint time. Part of this is that I have a stylistic preference for showing strong emotional and psychological experiences externally rather than internally, so alternating viewpoints gives me the change do show both of their reactions from someone else's point of view.
I'd have to do a serious analysis, but I'd definitely say that if a primary character doesn't get to be a viewpoint character, it's likely that I identify with her less. But sometimes it's simply that the story seems to call for a single point of view. For example, another of my half-written stories (that didn't get mentioned above) -- the one for which the cocktail-party synopsis is "Viking girl kidnaps Welsh princess!" -- the viewpoint character ("Welsh princess") is less in control of the action of the story and therefore makes a better observer/commenter on things, but also the gradual unveiling of the back-story of the second protagonist ("Viking girl") is a major part of the plot and it would be less natural to control that gradual unveiling if we were inside her head, rather than showing the backstory as our viewpoint character learns about it. But there's also an element that the Norse character falls more into the "needs to be tamed" role of the classic story arc, which works better as object than subject.
I try to make all my characters distinctive and individual, with a mix of positive traits and flaws, but I don't particularly aim to have their characteristics be strongly contrasting and complementary. (For one thing, it would get boring if I were basically writing the same couple over and over in different settings.) Overall, there's a slight tendency for one character to break gender norms more in terms of presentation and behavior, but I try to avoid ending up with every pairing boiling down to an obvious butch-femme contrast. So overall, while I don't identify with all my primary characters, I do use the doubled-opportunity for identification on a regular basis.
And not just doubled -- to some extent, I'm writing woman-centered stories in general, not just romantic-pair stories. There may be primary female characters available for identification purposes who aren't part of the main romance (or who have romantic entanglements but don't happen to be paired up at the end). For example, in my medievaloid alternate-world fantasy "Iultig's Dreams" (completed first draft, needs massive revision) there are three female main characters, all with very different backgrounds, personalities, and problems to solve. They are involved at different points in the story in two different romantic pairings (well, "pairings" at least -- it's complicated) but not as an adversarial "romantic triangle". Two are viewpoint characters; the third isn't, mostly because she undergoes less internal transformation over the course of the story. But she could easily be the character that some readers identify most strongly with.