The Unlikeable Heroine

I've been a little busy this week. I thought I would be doing the final edit on Magick and Murder, but the original ending was rather abrupt. After many tries to fix it, I scrapped it and wrote a few additional chapters so things make more sense.

I've also been re-reading a lot of Anne McCaffrey lately, and I found myself comparing and contrasting the Wilson twins with Anne's heroines, especially Killashandra Ree from the Crystal Singer series and Lessa of Benden Weyr from the Dragonriders of Pern series.

Why am I doing this? One concept emphasized in many of my early craft classes was if the story had a female protagonist, she must be likeable.

What the hell does this mean?

For a lot of writers and readers, this means the heroine is not allowed to have any flaws. Ironically, this means she needs to be polite, quiet, and demure. In other words, passive as fuck.

This behavior explains why I hated the Harlequin romances from the '70's and '80's, and I gravitated to fantasy and science fiction. For example, Lessa has a mind of her own. From the age of ten, she quietly sabotaged her home, Ruatha Hold, after it was conquered and her family murdered. When dragonriders appeared at Ruatha on Search for recruits, she manipulated their leader F'lar into dueling and killing the man responsible for her family's deaths.

F'lar still shakes Lessa and actually slaps her--actions that wouldn't go over well with a modern audience. Hell, it didn't go over well with F'lar's dragon Mnementh when the story was originally written in the '60's. But Lessa's fuck-you attitude more than makes up for F'lar's stupid and brutal behavior.

In Killashandra's case, she learns her voice is unacceptable to her teachers after ten hard years of training. Her dreams of being a solo performer are dashed in an instant. Her anger at being led on by her mentor cause her to leave the school while she tries to figure out what to do with her life.

She doesn't cry into her pillow in her dorm, which is what a "likeable" heroine would do. She ends up having a wild holiday with Carrick, a Crystal Singer, she met. When she tries to leave her home planet with Carrick, Killashandra's old mentor tries to stop her, saying she's mentally unstable. A tragic accident at the spaceport solidifies Killshandra's plan to leave home and become a Crystal Singer like Carrick.

Stubborn, angry young women, both of whom are everything I was told not to do.

Yet, Anne McCaffrey captured the warring needs within young people as they try to figure out themselves and their place in their worlds.

I found myself using Anne's examples in my own writing. I made the confusing juxtapostion of child and adult in one's teen years more intense by making the Wilson sisters identical twins. Are Kaley and Kirsten perfect? Hardly. But they are human. And I think that's the most important part of any character in the end.