That Smile

Women can be hard work.

I’m not just saying that because I have an insider’s perspective or an axe to grind, though my preferred weapon of choice at present seems to be oddly shaped daggers, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Not at all.

When I started writing my first stories, I chose to do them from the perspective of male characters, partly to distance myself from the stories I was telling, partly because I thought that if I hid behind a male persona, it wouldn’t give me away.

Naivety strikes again.

It also felt it would be an easier thing to do.

You how they say the grass looks greener on the other side, well you could also say that the storytelling looked simpler from an opposite perspective, without the emotional baggage and the complexities inherent in my own.

I wanted to be objective.

And if I could tell the story from a completely impartial point of view, then it might be possible to convey everything I wanted to say, without the hang-ups and struggles of the character … ahem, writer … getting in the way.

So I began to tell the story of a male character who was living in a haunted house, coping with a vicious poltergeist and other very nasty things happening to him.   

Okay, so I was reading a lot of Stephen King during my teenage years, and his stories were quite possibly influencing what I was writing.

And perhaps he scared me so badly one night that I wanted to get my own back.

So this male character, we’ll call him Stephen for the sake of argument, has to deal with spending the night in a haunted house, possibly as a test of manhood, but at the time I was more interested in the effect than the cause.

I threw the poltergeist at him within the first page, ostensibly to get the action started, though more likely as an avoidance of long descriptive passages of text.   

Hard to read, even harder to write.

The problem was, I had no idea what Stephen would do.

Try as I might, I could only put myself in his position and imagine what I would do, which kind of defeated the object of writing the story in the first place.   

Who cared what I would do?

But I could change the character into a tomboy called Steph.

It was the best of both worlds for a supernatural story; a girl in danger adds to the element of peril, and one who isn’t afraid of running, fighting and getting dirty, says this is a girl who has a chance of getting herself out of that danger.

And anyway, I was never really keen on characters unable to rescue themselves.

It is far more interesting to examine the depths of a character by throwing them into danger, and seeing how they cope with the life-threatening situations they find themselves in.

And far more importantly than HOW they cope.

Is IF they cope.

For a long time my tomboys seemed to get overwhelmed by the story and its dangerous circumstances.  Then they would end up either in dire need of rescue.

Or dead.

If they were going to survive the horrors of my storytelling, they would have to toughen up somewhat.

So out of necessity they did.

Funnily enough, it made for much more interesting, exciting and, dare I say it, complex stories - the one thing I thought at first I was trying to avoid.

Does that fall under the heading of ‘ironic’?  It does in my book.  Possibly not in the book of Ms Morissette, but then she really didn’t seem to understand it too well.

I think I understand it now.

I was asked at work the other day to explain the difference between irony and sarcasm.  It took me a minute to come up with an example, and this was the best I could do.

I said that telling someone to ‘Drop Dead’ is Sarcasm.

If they subsequently do, then that is Irony.

I think that's right.

Or perhaps I belong to the same camp as Ms Morissette?

I digress.

So it would appear that the characters who cope best within the realms of my hard and fast storytelling world are tough women, with complex emotional baggage, and the capacity to think their way out of a tricky situation.

They can be hard, and they can be hard work.

But it is all worthwhile when they kick-ass.

And give me that smile.