Babel Clash

As Nicole pointed out yesterday, we write vastly different types of heroines. Sabina Kane is closer to what most people think of as the stereotypical kick-ass UF heroine. She’s an assassin. She’s half-vampire, half-mage. She had a childhood that puts the funk in dysfunction. She likes guns and blood.

But more than that, Sabina is an anti-heroine.  If Nicole’s Jane True is an every woman (of sorts, she is a selkie, after all), then Sabina is a never-y woman. Look at her over there. She’ll cut a bitch. She’s caustic. She’s violent. She’s got a huge chip on her shoulder. She’s not someone most of us would or should aspire to be.

Writing Sabina is both challenging and a lot of fun. Challenging because her knack for self-delusion and sabotage makes me grit my teeth. Fun because, well, she’s so effing easy to piss off.

See, here’s the thing: My goal as an author is to show a both an external and internal journey. The external journey is the plot of my books. The internal journey is Sabina’s character growth. And the best way to make a stubborn character grow is to make them squirm.

Enter Giguhl, the hairless cat Mischief demon. You know other characters like Giguhl, they’re the humorous sidekicks, the foils, the mischief-makers of fiction. They get the best lines. They’re also sometimes hard to take seriously until WHAMO they say something so insightful that it knocks the protagonist for a loop. One of Giguhl’s comedic roles in the series (and, yes, there are others) is to shake up Sabina’s life. She needed a friend like Giguhl even if she didn’t know it. I like to call these characters “agents of benevolent chaos.”

But the ability to have a snarky foil to the protagonist’s straight man is only one humorous benefit of the kick-ass heroine. Another one is putting these characters, who crave control, into situations they have no hope of controlling. Embarrass them. Force them to question themselves. Make them interact with new people, places and situations that don’t fit into their myopic worldviews. The potential here is almost limitless. One of my favorite things to do is to take a gun-toting leather-clad bad ass and make them have to deal with something mundane and inconvenient–over-drafting their checking account, getting a speeding ticket, dealing with shitty customer service, whatever.

For the reader, these situations are funny because it’s awesome to see an über-strong character have to deal with the same shit we put up with day-in and day-out. On the outside, this type of humor is labeled “farce” or “travesty” and it can be quite funny. But more importantly these same comedic gems are also amazing tools to force character growth.

Of course, there’s other ways to force character growth that are scary or violent or gut-wrenching. Those are also interesting and fun to write. But I think the use of comedy as a tool for character growth character is vastly under-appreciated and under-discussed.

Or maybe I’m really just a sadist who enjoys torturing my characters.

Either way, I love writing a kick-ass heroine for a lot of reasons, but my favorite is because I get to screw with her. Maybe one day I’ll write a more “normal” character and then I’ll have new humorous devices at my disposal. But in the meantime, I’ll just keeping thinking up ways to make Sabina squirm.

So what say you, Dr. Peeler? What’s so funny about writing the every woman?

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