The Draft is Done!

On Monday I finally finished The Book That Would Not Die — the first draft of it. It came in at about 123,500 words. I’m not sure what will happen with the next draft. I’m sure there are some things that can be tightened up, and there are a couple of things I set up but ended up not using, so they can be cut, but I also know that I need to flesh some things out and add stuff like description and emotion, so we’ll see what happens in the next round.

But that probably won’t start until next month. It needs to rest a bit while I deal with other things. I have a lot of administrative work to catch up on. I need to take a slight break. I have some short pieces I want to play with.

I’ve been working on this book for so long that if feels weird not to be working on it. At night, after I’ve turned out the lights but before I fall asleep, I generally think about the book, going over what I wrote that day and imagining the next scene. It feels weird to not have a next scene to think of. I’ve caught myself imagining what the characters are doing after the book ends. It’s not scenes that will end up in a sequel, just the immediate next steps. I have some ideas for what could happen in the next book and I know the character arc, but I don’t have a specific plot. I’m sure it’ll come to me once I start working on revisions.

First, though, I need to reboot the brain. I took a little time off on Tuesday, doing my grocery shopping and then going to the park that has a nice field of bluebonnets to take a walk and have a picnic lunch. Today and tomorrow are admin days, and then I’m planning to give myself a long weekend before I dive into some short stories.

writing

The Book That Won’t Die

I had grand plans to take today off, since I surely would have finished the book. It’s a cool, gray day, perfect for curling up with a book. But I seem to be writing The Book That Won’t Die, so the book I’m curling up with is the one I’m writing.

I’m at nearly 120,000 words on this draft, which is the longest I’ve written. I think I hit about 110,000 words on the first drafts of a few of the early Enchanted, Inc. books. And I probably have at least 5,000 words to go. I suppose that’s not out of the norm for a fantasy novel. It’s even short by some fantasy standards. But it’s throwing off my mental pacing, both of where the various story elements should fall and of how long it should take me to write. I’d worried because the event that should have been the midpoint was falling at around 60,000 words, and it turns out that’s just about right.

So, I’m not getting my holiday today. I don’t know if I’ll finish today or if I’ll need to do the wrap-up scenes later. If I have stuff to wrap up, I don’t know whether to knock off early today, take the weekend, and then take a fresh look at the last chapter or so before writing the wrap-up scenes. I guess it’ll depend on where I get today and whether I feel like I have momentum or feel like I need a break.

It’s not as gray and rainy as the initial forecast said it would be, so I suppose I might as well be working instead of having a “rain” day. This may be my last day that’s this cool until October, so I do want to take advantage of it. I’m trying to think of a good movie for tonight, something of the sort to watch while snuggled under a blanket with a mug of hot cocoa. I’m not sure what that looks like, though. I kind of want to watch something like Stardust, but I’ve memorized that one and don’t want to wear it out, and there’s not a lot like that, other than The Princess Bride, which I’ve also just about memorized. Any ideas for what movies say “cozy” to you? What do you watch on a cool, possibly rainy, evening when you want to snuggle under a blanket and drink cocoa?

writing life

Compulsive Storytelling

There’s been a lot of talk in the writing and fantasy world about a recent article on a popular author. The article was bad enough that I won’t dignify it by linking to it, but an interesting thing that came out of it was that the writer believed the author has graphomania. He’s utterly compelled to write and would happily spend every hour of the day writing if he could. His idea of a vacation is having fewer things to take away from his time to write rather than taking a break from writing.

I definitely don’t have that, but I seem to have a sort of compulsive storytelling thing going on. I’m constantly coming up with and thinking about stories. My mind is always spinning with some kind of story idea, whether it’s the book I’m currently working on or something new. When I watch a movie or TV show or read a book, I find myself dreaming up story ideas inspired by it. I come up with spinoffs of my own ideas. Even if I had graphomania and wrote non-stop, I could never write all the ideas I come up with. This is why I laugh at the people who do the “I have a great idea for a book, I’ll tell you, you write it, and we’ll split the profits” routine with me. I already have more ideas than I know what to do with. Writing is the hard part.

But I’m not at all compelled to write them down. I mostly do that because writing stories down and sharing them is the way I make a living. Having stories constantly spinning in my head pretty much makes me unemployable at anything else. My mind is always elsewhere, and it takes me a lot of effort to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing.

Not all the ideas are worth writing down, and not all of them develop into books. Some are just mental amusements. Sometimes an idea develops for a long time and manages to become a book. Sometimes two ideas might collide and be enough to become a book. There are some ideas I’m more compelled to write than others, the ones I have to get out of my head or that I want to see in book form. Other ideas fizzle out and get forgotten. For instance, I had a story/characters in my brain for nearly twenty years, finally wrote it, couldn’t sell it, and have more or less forgotten it. Getting it written stopped it from playing out in my head anymore. Every so often, an old, forgotten idea will pop back up and demand attention. That’s what I’m working on now. I came up with the idea about 30 years ago, started working on it, then it fizzled. I wrote it ten years later, and it didn’t work. Then it popped up again and became something entirely different based on that setting/situation and characters.

I currently have stories for about five fictional universes at work in my brain. Just this week, I’m still figuring out the rest of the book I’m writing. I started thinking about a book I wrote a few years ago that didn’t quite work and that I’m thinking of revisiting for a different market. I figured out the book I’d want to write if I got a chance to pitch a book to the Star Wars universe. I’ve been pondering the book I started writing last year that didn’t quite work and have figured out what the problem was. I’ve also come up with several new characters and idea fragments in search of a home.

Maybe I need to develop graphomania so I can write all these stories, but there’s a huge gap between a mental story and a viable book, and figuring out what it takes to turn that mental story into a book can be incredibly difficult. Finding the words to convey the story is also hard work. I get exhausted from just spending a couple of hours a day actually writing. The rest of the day is spent thinking about what I’m writing and figuring out how the next scene should go.

If I didn’t have to make a living, I don’t know how much I’d end up writing. Like, if I won one of those billion-dollar lottery jackpots and no longer needed to earn money from writing, I might just spend my days doing stuff like gardening or hiking, with my brain happily dreaming up stories but without having to do the hard work of turning them into books. Or I might need to write some of them down just to clear out my head.

writing

Not There Yet

It seems I was perhaps a bit overly optimistic when I thought I’d finish this book this week. It’s easy to forget that more detailed, action-oriented scenes are a lot slower to write. I also had the issue that while I know what will happen, I’m not entirely clear on how it will happen, so there’s a lot of brainstorming before I can write each scene as I try to picture it and think of what, exactly will happen to bring about the plot points I already know about.

It’s funny how my mental images of these scenes have changed along the way. The scene I wrote yesterday ended up happening in an entirely different way than I originally planned, in a different place, with different people involved.

I’m also in the phase of “headlight writing,” where I can only see the scene immediately ahead of me, and I need to write it before I get a clear mental image of the next scene.

As a result, it may take me all week next week to write the rest of the book I thought I’d finish this week. It’s already longer than any other first draft I think I’ve ever written. It’s epic-style fantasy, so it can be a bit longer, but there may also be some cutting.

I like the way it’s shaping up, though. The things I’m coming up with now are definite improvements on my initial ideas, so it’s worth taking the time to think through it. This is normally when I get impatient and rush ahead, then have to drastically rewrite, so it’s good that I’m taking my time to try to get it right.

I do feel bad because I’m doing mean things to my hero now. He’ll end up better for it, in the long run, but he has to go through some stuff first.

I definitely have “book brain.” I was mentally planning the scene I needed to write this morning as I was falling asleep last night. Then in the middle of the night I woke in a panic because I’d forgotten to take into consideration the hero’s nephew Jonathan in my plans for the scene, and that was going to throw off all my plans. When I woke for real in the morning and thought about it, I remembered that there is no nephew Jonathan. The hero doesn’t have a nephew. The name “Jonathan” wouldn’t fit into this world. It’s important to the story that the hero is alone in this scene, facing the bad guys by himself. I suspect my brain was playing with something I did forget. I’d realized earlier in the evening that I had forgotten to take a certain element of how the magic works into consideration in my initial plans for the scene, and that’s why I was thinking about it as I fell asleep. I was figuring out how to work around it. I’d already had the “I forgot to consider this!” panic, and I guess it got incorporated into a dream. I have no idea where the nephew Jonathan came from, but now I think I absolutely have to have a character in some book have a nephew named Jonathan who’s present in a scene but not noticed by anyone.

And now back to not writing about Jonathan.

movies, TV, writing

Redemption Arcs

In the book I’m currently working on, for the first time in my career I have scenes written from the perspective of one of the villains. He’s a henchman, not the big bad, and he’s the one sent out as the errand boy for the offstage villain. I haven’t decided yet if this guy is going to get a redemption arc, if maybe he’ll end up turning against the villain and joining the good guys, but pondering that has had me thinking about redemption arcs. I like them in theory. I belong to a religious tradition that’s all about redemption and believes that no one is beyond salvation, but I’m also picky about fictional redemption. I love the moment when a villain flips and joins the good guys, but I want to really feel the redemption, and I don’t want someone who’s done true evil to get off lightly.

A few years ago in a TV discussion forum, I jokingly came up with the redemption equation:

bad deeds=good deeds+remorse+suffering

The idea is that both sides of the equation have to balance for the redemption arc to be satisfying. If the good deeds, the remorse the character feels for the bad deeds, and the suffering don’t seem equal to the bad deeds the character has done, it doesn’t work. By suffering, I mean the consequences for the bad deeds, like prison time or other people not liking them; karmic payback; or mitigating circumstances (like a street kid taken in by the leader of a criminal gang). It doesn’t count if it’s suffering the characters bring on themselves. If you murder your parents, you don’t get suffering points for being an orphan, for instance. The worse the bad deeds are, the more the other things have to make up for it. It does get to the point where the bad deeds are so bad that you can’t imagine making up for it in a way that would allow an audience to accept a redemption. That doesn’t mean the character can’t ever be redeemed, but it may require the character to die for redemption to work. You can’t imagine that character just going on and hanging out with the other good guys.

Not that people haven’t written that. One of my biggest gripes with the TV series Once Upon a Time was the fact that the big bad from season one, someone who was shown to have casually murdered innocents because she was having a bad day and who cursed an entire civilization, was crowned Queen of the Universe by her former victims in the series finale, after she’d spent most of the series being friends with her former victims — and in spite of her never apologizing or acknowledging the harm she’d done. She just stopped being evil, with no explanation for why she stopped, and she never actually changed her attitude.

And I think that’s key to the redemption arc. There has to be a reason the villain stops villaining, and usually it’s the “are we the baddies?” moment, when the villain realizes that they’ve been wrong. If they don’t realize that killing and torturing people is bad or that they were on the wrong side and their reasons for doing evil weren’t valid, why would they change?

This is my problem with the “redemption” of Darth Vader (you knew this would get around to Star Wars, didn’t you?). I don’t know that we ever really got the moment of him realizing he was in the wrong. His redemption involved him choosing his son over the guy he was already planning to betray. That’s still a somewhat selfish move. He couldn’t stir himself to save entire planets, but when it was his son in danger, then he acted. Now, maybe I could be generous and say that hearing Luke refuse to kill him because he’s a Jedi like his father gave him his, “Whoa, I’ve been doing it wrong,” moment, but it’s still not super satisfying to me. It only really works because he immediately dies. It wouldn’t have worked if he’d lived and had become a good guy, hanging out with his kids. I’m not even that keen on the fact that he got to be a Force ghost. I don’t know if that’s the equivalent of Force heaven, but a last-minute change of heart doesn’t seem like it should allow him to hang around as a Force ghost, and I was especially irked when they re-edited it to be his younger self, when they didn’t also change Obi-Wan (and would Luke even have known who that random young guy who looked nothing like the man under the mask was?).

Image of dying, maskless Darth Vader. Text: I chose you over the guy I was planning to betray. You were right, there is good in me!

In the Star Wars world, they did a bit better with the redemption of Kylo Ren. It happened before the very end. He had a chance to really think about what he’d done, and he made an active choice to go help Rey — that wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. And, again, he died, giving up his life for someone else’s. He didn’t get to hang around with the good guys and live happily ever after.

As bad as Once Upon a Time was with that one character, they also managed to do it right. Their version of Captain Hook had some good reasons for being the way he was (explanations, not excuses). He had been wronged. He just went over the top in doing something about it. He had a big realization that he’d wasted his life in revenge and that people didn’t like him because he’d done horrible things. He even later counseled other villains about this and helped turn people away from becoming villains by sharing his advice. When he ran into former victims, he tried to atone and set things right with them. He got hit by a lot of karma on his way to redemption. It seemed like every time he did something bad, he’d get hit by a car, kidnapped, etc. And his suffering didn’t end when he turned good. He did some pretty big heroic acts as a good guy, so he had the good deeds to balance the bad. They did another good redemption arc on the Wonderland spinoff, with a character who was a villain for the first half of the series having a huge turnaround, realizing how badly she’d screwed up. She had to face some of her victims and learn how she affected them, and she had to work to earn the trust of the people she’d hurt, even after she turned good.

I do think it works better for the henchmen to be redeemed, the ones who were following orders or who’d been taught evil. It’s less believable when the big bad, the one who came up with and led the evil schemes, changes sides. Though it might make for a fun story if the big bad did change sides but all the henchmen were still on board with the previous goals and ended up fighting against the former big bad.

I think there’s room for my guy to be redeemed. He hasn’t done any large-scale evil. He’s the kind of weasel who stirs other people up to do his dirty work rather than doing it for himself. He’s suffered some, and he comes from a background that somewhat explains why he’s the way he is. He just made some poor choices in response to those circumstances. He’s enough of a jerk that I can’t imagine him joining the found family of team good guys, but he might realize the big bad has been using him and switch sides in the final showdown. We’ll see.

writing

The Final Push

I’m so close to the end of this book. I could reach my target word count in a day’s work, but I won’t be at the end of the story then. This may be a somewhat longer book, but since it’s fantasy I figure that’s to be expected.

Normally when I’m at this point, I find myself impatiently rushing to the end because I’m so eager to get the book done, but I’m strangely reluctant to finish this one. I don’t really want it to be over with. I’m enjoying spending time with these characters. It’s like when you’re reading a book you don’t want to end, and you slow down to savor each page.

I suspect some of my current slowdown has to do with where I am in the book. I’m in the slight lull where they regroup before the final push, and I’m enjoying the characters having a moment to catch their breath and interact. The next thing I have to do involves shoving them out of a safe place and making them do difficult things, and I’m a little reluctant to do that, even as I’m also eager to see this part of the story play out.

No matter how much I drag my feet, I should finish this book next week. That means I’ll be in what I call Book Brain mode, when I don’t really want to think about anything else while I immerse myself in the book. I picked up some convenience food at the grocery store so I’ll have meals I can just reheat, and I might cook a few things this weekend so I’ll have leftovers. I took care of the serious errands this week, so I shouldn’t have to go anywhere until late in the week.

And then when I finish this draft I have some admin tasks to take care of, but then I’m going to give myself a little time off to relax and think. I need to start figuring out the next thing to write. I got a new idea I want to play with. It’s a long way from being ready to write, but I can start thinking about it.

movies, writing

Ending With a Bang

I’m getting close to the ending of the first draft of the book I’m working on, and that has me thinking about endings. There’s a frequently repeated bit of writing advice about how the first few pages sell this book and the last few pages sell the next book. You want readers to get to the end of the book and want to immediately read the next one. But what, aside from a huge cliffhanger, has that effect? As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve come to the conclusion that it has to do with leaving a reader feeling something.

I discovered one trick for this a number of years ago when I was reading books to judge for a romance contest. I ended up with a book by a top-selling author, and I’ve got to admit that I wasn’t impressed. The book was doing nothing for me, but then I got to the end and read the resolution with a tear in my eye, and I realized she got me, in spite of my misgivings. The next year, I got another book by that author in my selection of books to judge. I read that book on a plane. Near the end of the book, something bad happened to a kid, and it was a real tearjerker moment. I just had the final scene or two of the book to read when the plane got to the gate and I had to put the book down to get off the plane. Then I had to get out of the airport, take the train downtown, get to the office of the friend I was visiting, get shown around her office, then go to a nearby bookstore cafe to hang out until she got off work before I was able to pick up the book again and read the ending. And that ending left me cold. That’s when I realized what she did. She’d have some really emotional thing that didn’t even have anything to do with the plot happen just before the ending so that you read the resolution of the romance and ended the book with a tear in your eye, and that gave you the impression that the book had really touched you. It was so quick from the tearjerking moment to the end that I may be the only reader who put the book down at exactly that point, since I had to. If you separated the ending from the previous scene, there was nothing special about it. She’d done a similar thing in the previous book, only it was an old person with a health crisis.

In my recent Star Wars viewing project, I was also looking at the endings because I recall always leaving the theater after one of those movies excited and wanting to see it again, even when the movie itself wasn’t actually that great. I remember feeling that way about The Phantom Menace, and I can barely sit through that movie. I’ve noticed that there’s a sequence in the last part of almost all of those films that I think has a lot to do with the way people react to them (the rest is due to John Williams because the music really helps). The last quarter or so of these movies builds to a climax with intense tension and high stakes, resulting in a cathartic moment that releases the tension (usually, it involves reaching safety in some way). After that, there’s celebration and connection, usually with hugging. And then there’s something to create a lingering emotional impression that has the audience feeling something as they leave the theater (again, with some help from John Williams).

The throne room scene at the ending of Star Wars, with the characters lined up on the temple steps and Han and Luke wearing medals
Yay! We won! And we’re heroes, with the medals to prove it.

Take the first movie: We have the space battle with the ticking clock — will they destroy the Death Star before it destroys the rebel base? — with the space station blowing up being about as spectacular a catharsis as you get. Then they return to the base, and there’s lots of hugging. Our final emotional impression is one of triumph with the medal ceremony. You get a similar sequence in Return of the Jedi and the sequel trilogy. Battle, something blows up, hugging, then a big emotional hit. The Empire Strikes Back works a little differently, since there’s no clear victory. Our cathartic moment is the ship going to lightspeed, which means they’ve escaped and will be safe, but we get the bonding and hugging before that, when the Falcon rescues Luke. The prequels are all a downward slide. We get the regular sequence in The Phantom Menace, with that final celebration mirroring the first movie, right down to ending with everyone lined up on the stairs. The lingering emotional impressions are mostly nostalgic, since we’re seeing things happen that we’ve heard about or known must have happened, like Obi-Wan taking on Anakin to train or the start of the Clone Wars. Revenge of the Sith goes for full nostalgia, with a repeat of the twin sunset moment from the first movie, but with baby Luke and his aunt and uncle.

I’ve been looking at how this works in other movies and books. It’s less obvious in books, since they don’t have visuals or John Williams, but I have spotted it in some books. In The Mummy, we had the frantic escape, the “whew, we’re safe” moment, and the bonding, since that’s where the romance was resolved, though I don’t think the lingering emotional impression was as strong.

Oddly, the one of the Indiana Jones movies that does this the best was the most horrible. I rewatched Temple of Doom last weekend, and I kept pondering turning it off because it was so unpleasant, but then I found myself weirdly happy at the end and realized they’d done this sequence. We had the big action sequence, ending with the defeat of the villain (one of the few times Indy has something to do with that) and the cavalry showing up. Then they return to the village with the captured children and there’s lots of hugging as all the families are reunited. Our final impression is of Indy and Willie kissing, with Short Round on the baby elephant in the background, and everyone is happy. Doing a satisfying ending can salvage even an unpleasant movie.

I need to look back at my favorite books, the ones that have me wanting to either re-read them or read the next one right away, and see what the lingering emotional impression is. And then see if I can figure out how to use this. What do I want readers to feel when they close each book?

fantasy, Books

Another Fantasy Road Trip

I’ve been talking about that fantasy journey/road trip story with a bit of romance that I’m constantly looking for, and I’ve found a new one!

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher is just the thing. It reads like a fairy tale retelling, but it’s an original story (at least, I don’t recognize any particular fairy tales). A princess realizes that her older sister who was married to the prince of a neighboring kingdom in order to create an alliance and prevent a war is being abused by her husband, and since his family is under magical protection, it will take magic to do anything about him. So, she sets out to save her sister, doing the usual impossible tasks to get supernatural help, and then she and an unlikely team, including a witch, a disgraced swordsman, a demon-possessed chicken, an enchanted dog made of bones, and a ditzy godmother, set out on a journey to the neighboring kingdom to see what they can do about that evil prince.

We have the journey, the personal growth of the main character, the subtly developing romance, magic, adventure, and lots of good snark and humor. It does get a little macabre and doesn’t shy away from the horror of what’s happening with the sister, but it’s ultimately an uplifting story. It’s also short. I read it in a couple of sittings and was sad when it was over.

For another book recommendation, I also recently read Babel by R.F. Kuang. I think fans of my Rebels series might like this because it’s along similar lines, an alternate history about the British Empire using magic to maintain power and about the student secret organization rebelling against the empire. The story is set early in the Victorian era in Oxford, where foreign-born students have been recruited to the program that uses translation and language for magic. Magic is done using words from different languages that have similar but not exactly the same meaning, which means they need people who have native fluency in both languages. At first, these students are thrilled to be a part of Oxford life, but then they start to realize what’s really going on and how this magic is being used and have to figure out what to do about it.

This is a book that creeps under your skin, where you start seeing the story as one way, and then have your perspective shifted. There’s the idyllic student life and then the growing awareness of the real situation. I found the book utterly engrossing and thought-provoking. It’s written a lot like a history book, complete with footnotes.

A lot of my reading recently has been later books in series I’ve already discussed or else books I don’t really care to discuss, and then I suddenly had two good ones back to back.

movies

Women of Action

After I finished my Star Wars marathon, I decided Indiana Jones would be a good next step, so last Friday I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then I guess I was in the mood for more adventure set in Egypt, so I watched The Mummy, the late 90s version with (Oscar winner!) Brendan Fraser. And I realized that this whole thing has given an interesting perspective on the role of women in action movies over about four decades.

I still remember vividly my reaction to Princess Leia when I first saw the original Star Wars as a kid. Our first impression was very princess-like. She wore flowing white robes and had that soft cowl hood around her head, making her look angelic. And then she whipped out a blaster and shot stormtroopers. That blew my nine-year-old mind. After that, she sassed Darth Vader, who intimidated everyone else. I’d never seen a woman get to be like that in a movie before. But in my latest viewing, I noticed that once the guys are on the scene, she practically gets demoted. She gets them out of the detention area and she gets a few snappy lines, but she mostly functions as the person to get rescued and helped by the big, strong men. It had never occurred to me before how Han just assumes Luke is the one to put on the gun when they’re escaping from the Death Star. It’s like he doesn’t even consider Leia could be useful, even though this is only Luke’s second time in a spaceship (the first time was on the trip to the Death Star). Luke had said he was a pretty good pilot, so wouldn’t it have made more sense to have him helping Chewie while Leia shoots the gun? They’d seen her handle a blaster. And it’s even odder to watch now that we know more about Leia. She totally could have handled that gun. After her strong start, she spends the final battle watching anxiously, and then in the second movie she’s essentially a love interest.

She doesn’t really get to do much interesting stuff until the third movie, when she’s part of the rescue operation and then gets to do some fighting (with the infamous gold bikini in between).

Marion from Raiders comes during those movies. I remember reading an article the summer that movie came out about how it was the summer of strong women in movies. Marion could out-drink men and punched Indy when she saw him, and she took out some bad guys with a frying pan in a fight. They also referred to the Bond girl in that summer’s Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, who was a scientist and fired a mean crossbow, and the girl in Dragonslayer, who posed as a boy. But Marion follows a similar trajectory to Leia, with a strong tough-girl start but then getting turned into the person who has to be rescued (and who keeps getting put in ridiculous costumes). Whenever she does something to help out, it backfires, like when she hides in the basket that makes it easier to capture her or she gets in the gun turret of the plane to shoot but then gets stuck there and has to be saved.

The Mummy (1999) movie poster, with the guy in the foreground and the woman behind him.
The guy may be in the foreground, but the woman is actually the protagonist of this movie. He’s just along for the ride while she drives the action.

Then we get to The Mummy, nearly 20 years later. They basically split the character of Indiana Jones into two people, with Evie as the brainy archaeologist side and Rick as the action hero side. She drives a lot of the action with her choices (some of them bad). I would say that she’s actually the protagonist of the movie, rather than being a reward or a sidekick. She’s the one with the story goal who makes the choices at each turning point that drag them deeper into the story. She’s the one with the knowledge that gets them out of trouble sometimes—and often gets them into trouble. So this is all a huge improvement over the way women tend to be depicted in action movies. And yet she’s also the damsel in distress who needs to be rescued frequently, and a lot of this happens when she’s wearing either a sexy outfit or a sexy nightgown. I do like the way the romantic relationship in the movie is treated as a partnership and her brains are shown to be an equal asset to his brawn. Not every “strong female character” has to be quick with her fists or good with a gun. Evie is just about unflappable, has a lot of knowledge, and thinks well on her feet. I just wish she didn’t need rescuing so often.

The Star Wars prequels came out around this time, and I’m not sure Lucas knew what to do with Padme as a character. There had to be a girl, since this is the story of how Luke and Leia came to be. Padme has a position of power and is shown to be brave and smart, but most of the time, she exists as a beautiful lamp. She doesn’t really do much of anything that’s all that important to any of the stories other than give birth and motivate Anakin. She doesn’t even really make a lot of sense. Anakin has opinions and actions that go against everything she supposedly passionately believes in, and this doesn’t seem to change her view of him.

But I think we’ve come a long way by the time we get to the more recent Star Wars movies and TV shows. We get a heroine in Rey who doesn’t need to be rescued. She’s not a “Rambo in drag” type. She can be gentle and caring. One of her Force strengths is in healing. But she’ll fight if she has to. She makes choices and sometimes screws up. We also get to see an older Leia as a true leader who’s capable of making difficult decisions for the greater good. Then there’s Rogue One’s Jyn. I love how in the finale of the second season of The Mandalorian, Mando’s team when they take on the Imperial ship is three women.

Most important to me is that it’s no longer just The Girl with all the guys. When I was a kid playing Star Wars with the neighborhood kids, when we’d run around playing lightsaber battles or pretending our bicycles were X-wings or TIE fighters the girls would fight over who got to be Leia. Some of my earliest storytelling came from making up new characters to play when I didn’t win the fight over getting to be Leia. Girls today might fight over who gets to be the main female character, but they wouldn’t have to make up new characters in order for everyone to play. There are female X-wing pilots, commanders, politicians, mechanics, rebel leaders, etc. True, there are generally still more male main characters than female main characters, even when the protagonist is female, but that’s better than in the earlier movies when there were two female characters who had speaking roles, and one of those had one to two scenes early in the movie before vanishing.

Of course, not everyone is happy with this development, and female characters come in for some harsh criticism, but that’s a subject for another post.

movies

Rogue One and Romance

I mentioned in my previous post that the movie Rogue One shares a structure with historical romance, so now the explanation. This post will spoil the whole plot of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. Even if you don’t like Star Wars, this movie is possibly the least Star-Warsy of the movies. It’s more like a war movie that has some spaceships. And maybe kind of like an old-school historical romance.

I haven’t read historical romances in ages, so this is based on the ones I read from the 70s and 80s, and it’s possible that there’s some selection bias here, in that it’s the ones I happened to read, but those old-school romances that were often dismissed as “bodice rippers” were often pretty decent adventure stories. There was generally some external plot, like war or piracy. You’d lose a lot of the story if you removed the romance, but there was still a plot outside the romance. Our hero and heroine were thrown together by some circumstance, and they had internal issues with each other. They might see past each other’s facades and resent that, or they might make each other feel uncomfortable things. Sometimes they were on opposite sides of a conflict (he’s a Norman, she’s a Saxon, etc.). In the first half of the book, there was a lot of bickering and bantering as they clashed. Then as they went through some kind of adventure ordeal, they’d realize they could trust each other and dropped their facades to fall in love. This was when the spicy stuff would kick in (though there might have been some less than consensual spicy stuff earlier because this was the 70s-80s). From that point forward, the conflict wouldn’t be between them, but was the two of them against the world, as they had to resolve that external conflict in order to be able to be together for good. I was the weirdo who read these for the war and adventure part, not the spicy stuff, and my favorite part was when they got over their conflict with each other to take on the bad guys together.

Now, Rogue One would never be classified as a Romance, given that there’s not so much as a kiss and both of them die at the end. But it does follow the same basic plot structure as those old romance novels.

They’re initially thrown together in an assignment, and neither of them is happy about it. Jyn is being coerced—if she doesn’t help the rebels get the information from the splinter rebel group, she’ll get sent back to the prison they broke her out of. Cassian has better things to do than babysit this brat. Now that we’ve seen some of his origin in the Andor series, it seems like it’s the case of people who remind us of the parts of ourselves we don’t like being the most annoying to us because he was once exactly like she is at the beginning of the movie, a rebel with no cause, just lashing out at the universe in general and taking no responsibility for anything higher or greater than himself. So, there’s lots of bickering as she gives him attitude and he doesn’t take it.

But they start to grow on each other as they go through the adventure together. They’re both good in a fight and work well as a team. He sees that she’s capable of being unselfish when she risks herself to save a child during a firefight. They start to bond as they escape together and move on to the next phase of the mission: finding her father, who’s been working for the Empire but who may have information on how to destroy the Death Star. But even as they bond, there’s a secret between them. She doesn’t know that his orders are to kill her father when they find him.

There’s another big action ordeal when they get to the Imperial base. He can’t go through with killing her father and sympathizes with her when her father is killed in an attack, anyway. She feels betrayed by his secret. But then he totally redeems himself to her when he takes her side and commits to going rogue to go steal the Death Star plans with her, along with other rebels he’s recruited. From there, it’s the two of them against the world as they work together to get the plans. Then they spend their final moments together, with him reassuring her about her father being proud of her, and they die in each other’s arms. There is a moment between them after they’ve completed their mission that seems pretty loaded, like something might have happened if the Death Star hadn’t shown up, but I don’t know if that was scripted or the actors playing with subtext.

Cassian and Jyn embrace as the Death Star shock wave approaches them at the end of Rogue One
I couldn’t find a good picture of the elevator scene, but this is our last image of these two, and it’s not entirely unromantic.

This may be why I like this movie so much. I’m totally a sucker for the “start with bickering, then take on the universe together” trope, whether or not it’s overtly romantic. It even works when it’s just friends, like all those buddy cop stories with the mismatched partners who start out hating each other and then become a great team.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this because the book I’m working on now fits into this pattern. I’m at the part where they’re starting to bond after going through something difficult together, and it’s so much fun.