This week has been rough.

I wish I had the courage to write from my heart when it came to the shootings in California. But I can't. I can't find the words. All I can do is copy and paste this essay that I wrote a couple of years ago, about female heroes in literature. I guess that's the way I can start to express my fear and repulsion. Because we are writers. Some of us are women writers. And we have a duty to change the tides with our words.

Let's start here:

July, 2012.

This is a blog entry I’ve wanted to write for a very long time. I know that I wrote a bit about it before, talking about the Jonas Exercise and discussing how completely floored I was at Jennifer Lawrence and Suzanne Collins’ work on The Hunger Games. To recap, the Jonas Exercise is taking a male character and seeing if a gender-bend would fly narratively for that story.

However, there's more to say. And I just haven’t gotten around to collecting the words to say it.

I guess I would like to start off by telling another personal anecdote: the day I realized I was a girl, and that meant I counted for less of a character.

I was playing with my brother and cousin at my grandmother’s home when we started picking out what parts we were going to act out for our Disney game. They had a plethora to pick from: Beast, Lumiere, Aladdin, Jafar, Triton, Sebastian, Simba …

I had the princesses. That was it.

And while I loved the princesses, I also loved the current RPG we were acting out in the living room, and that was The Lion King. I quickly had my pick of two characters: Nala or Sarabi. The girlfriend or the matronly mom lion.

I wanted neither.

This led to an argument with my cousin as to who was going to play Goliath in our next game: Gargoyles. My cousin pointed out I was fit to only play Demona, the lone gargolye chick on the show. After already being shunned to playing Nala, I did not want to play Demona. I wanted to play the awesome main character. But my cousin was having none of it.

This led to us deciding to play Power Rangers instead. I wanted to play the White Ranger, and my cousin again pointed out I could only pick from the Pink or Yellow Ranger. And if you know anything about the Power Rangers, you know that both of those characters are terrible. Pinkie is a flippant airhead and Yellow doesn’t have any sort of personality whatsoever.

Suffice to say, I punched my cousin in the face and play time was cut short.

I’ve learned many things since then, one of them being not to punch people in the face. I’ve also learned that what I was experiencing is still something I’ve experienced in the past year. Although things are better now for our female characters, they aren’t better by much. They gave us voluptuous potato sacks with the brains of a galvanized frog, and recently they are kind enough to give us perky or rebelliously pretty potato sacks with the brains of a galvanized frog. And don’t get me wrong, I would take Rapunzel over Jasmine or Ariel any day, but I would also like an actual human being. Or a not-princess.

And we were so close, weren’t we? We saw Emma Watson's Hermione. And with Katniss Everdeen, a promising premise to Snow White and the Huntsman, a (gasp) single heroine in Frozen, and an unlikely beauty in Brave, we were on our way. So what went wrong? Why are we still not there?

Maybe because we’re trying to make a strong girl character, and not just a strong character. I believe the two largest problems is this feeling of writers patronizingly making up for the lack of awesome girlness, as if Hollywood is saying “See? We can be hip! We have an awesome girl heroine!” And that heroine, if a hero, would look like a dim-witted selfish prat (Merida), a still sexy but troubled and alone and very marketable princess with a sweet theme song (Elsa), a girl who is supposed to be saving the world but instead is constantly bombarded by a love triangle (Katniss), or a character that makes no decisions for himself (Snow White).

The second largest problem is the idea that women are seen as a completely different species than men. Freud never could figure out what women wanted, and as a woman, I don’t think it’s that difficult to figure out.

So Hollywood. So writers. So book publishers. This is what I want.

I want a character who is not afraid to speak her mind, because she wants what she wants and she doesn’t care what anyone has to say about it.

I want a character who makes her choices and thus brings the plot upon herself, not a Kristen Stewart who bumbles around behind Thor and has things happen to her. Or a Katniss who gets stuck in a bunker and told what to do. I want her to hold the reins and make mistakes and cleverly work through the snags.

I want a character who won’t self-destruct or fall off a cliff without their male counterpart. Bella.

I want a character who has better things to worry about than who likes her or who she likes.

I want a character who isn’t wanted or pursued by anyone.

I want a character who doesn't sacrifice herself for the betterment of a dude or a civilization, like she's some kind of Mayan virgin. In other words ...

I want a character who does not end up married or dead.

I want a character who works hard on her own to earn what she wants.

I want a character who isn’t pretty. Maybe she’s too skinny, maybe she’s too fat. Maybe she has an ugly voice. Maybe she’s too tall.

I want a character who doesn’t wear makeup and doesn’t have perfect hair, even after all hell breaks loose.

I want a character who has never been told she has to grow up and marry anyone.

I want a character who is never addressed with a jeering “because you’re a gi-irl!” from a male character. Even if it's considered motivation for her to prove him wrong.

I want a character who is attempting to honor her mother’s love and her father’s strength. And when one of them fails her, I want her to stand up to the challenge.

I want a character who doesn’t know how it’s going to end up, but she keeps a strong face. Or maybe she breaks down.

I want a character who doesn’t have to shoot an arrow twice as well as a boy in order to prove her worth.

I want a character who isn’t a walking stereotype of a tomboy if she's not feminine.

I want a character who is not a decoration, a mother, a witch, or a spitfire.

I want a character who doesn't constantly think of her femininity. It will of course come up, but no one walks around all day thinking, "Boy, how woman am I? I'm pretty dang woman right now. Oh look, a man!"

And I guess, what I really want is a character boys would want to play on the playground.

But here are a few things you should also know about girls:

Sometimes we do fall down and cry, and that’s okay.

Sometimes we do fall in love, and sometimes we don’t. But if we do, we will fight tooth and nail for that man and ourselves. And that strength doesn’t come out of girlish fancy or stupidity. It comes from love.

Sometimes we want to be pretty, but a good amount of the time, we don’t feel like we are. And other times, we don’t care.

Sometimes we forget we are girls, and we just regard ourselves as people.

Sometimes we are afraid of how the world sees us, and sometimes we have to be brave to walk down the street.

Sometimes we are not quirky nor are we fashionable, we are not ditzy nor are we geeky. Sometimes we are just who we are.

Sometimes we are scared, but sometimes we are steadfast. We always keep moving.

Sometimes we think about things that aren’t boys or being a mother or going against the status quo.

Sometimes we just want to be firemen and astronauts, and it isn't until someone says we can't be that we realize there's a lot of hurdles ahead of us and two girl characters in The Lion King.

Sometimes we aren’t spunky or strong-willed; we’re just mean.

But most of all, we are always human beings.

So please write like we are just that: human beings.

Death is a weird thing. We don't know what happens afterwards. We're not sure anything happens. All we know is the story of the survivor; the people still on this side of the curtain, missing and hurting and hoping. It's not fun to die, not from our perspective. And that causes turmoil when death happens. We don't see it as a moving on; we see it as a loss. As an end.

So something weird happened to me this week while I was writing. I killed a character, and I actually couldn't continue to write the scene. It gave me the same visceral reaction the end of Harry Potter gave me when Sirius Black died (and the plethora of other characters who followed).

I actually packed up and went home and refused to finish the scene.

"This will be the last scene I write," I told Alex. "I can't. If I write this scene, and it's done and this is the way it has to go, then I cannot in good conscience write these characters just to end them in this much hurt."

"Well," Alex shrugged. "That's a good thing, right?"

This might sound like the dumbest conversation ever, to people who don't write. To those of us who have had to kill a character, it is a struggle we've faced since we started being "Gods of our Universes," as an old professor said. There is a lot of philosophy and theory that goes into writing a world, because honestly, in order to have a realistic world, it must be real. If someone doesn't believe writers think like this, please direct them towards Zack Helm's Stranger Than Fiction.

So if the world is real, does that mean then, that in some way, we are killing an entity? When Sherlock dove off the cliff, when Sirius fell behind the veil, or when Mufasa slammed into the bottom of the canyon, were those not deaths that made a difference? Was that not the absence of an entity in our world?

For anyone who has ever read vigorously or written passionately, the answer would be yes.

During Nanowrimo, one of the prompts read: "Write a letter as your protagonist to yourself, the author." This is all my letter said:

"Dear Ms. Dawson,

Please don't kill them.

- (Character)"

I showed it to Alex, and he started crying.

That's how ridiculous and invested we may be.

But is it a good thing? If I feel physically ill and mentally spent after killing a character? Does that automatically mean a good ending?

Honestly, it doesn't.

For how many good reasons to kill a character, there are a hundred bad reasons. I've seen characters die of God complexes, shitty twists, tear-jerkers, and stupid-shitty-writer-itis. What is stupid-shitty-writer-itis? When you do something stupid and shitty just because you're a writer.

"It will mean something if I kill him." "It will cause stress to my readers if I kill her." "Ah, but I will surprise and shock them because it hasn't been done before!" Or the worst, the stupidest, and the shittiest: "If these people die, then you just don't know who's going to go next!"

That last award goes to George R.R. Martin. To clarify, Martin is not a shitty writer. But as much as I absolutely love Martin's prose and language and character building, I can't bring myself to read the next book and I am forced to watch the TV show. While I agree with and love the the idea of "Drew Barrymoring" a character in order to create the feeling that no character is sacred (see: Scream), I do think that Barrymoring every character in every other chapter is just too overwhelming and gives no reason to keep reading. We connect through our characters.

But I will also argue that I am much younger and not as brilliant as George R.R. Martin, so I may completely agree with him in twenty years.

When you kill too much or you kill for the wrong reasons, then the book becomes meaningless and contrived.

So when is it okay to kill characters? Some people make the mistake of never killing a character. Everyone either Disney Deaths back to life (getting in the sobs of a death scene only to cough a little and open their eyes to a "Baloo! You're alive!"), or they protect all of their main characters out of a fear of doing them wrong or having to say goodbye to them too soon.

So here it is, the reason why you should kill a character. It must push the story developmentally through one of the elements of fiction (minus "language," because no you don't get to kill someone off just to write a beautiful paragraph about butterflies and gravestones):

1. It moves a character forward. (Harry must move alone without his parentals in order to grow)
2. It moves the plot along. (Because of Voldemort's death, we lead into the denouement)
3. It sets the tone for your time and place. (Cedric Diggory is dead, and things are getting real)
4. It fits into your overall theme. (Sirius Black dies without any reason, which is how death works, and it teaches Harry to heal and keep moving on)

Those are the only four reasons why you should kill a character.

One other thing you need to look at: What does death mean in your book's world? In some of my own books, I have no afterlife. In the one I am writing right now, there is an afterlife. Continuing with the Harry Potter examples, Rowling most definitely has a clear afterlife involved in her mythos. Because of this, death does not take on the same weight as death takes on in Westeros, where you are dead and cold as soon as the blood drains from the heart from whence the Hound stabbed the ever-living crap out of you.

So if you have created an atheist world, that means your character is gone forever. If you have created a Christian world, that means your character is being judged. If you have created a world with resurrection, or reincarnation, or hauntings, or other dimensions or other levels ... what does that mean for the growth of your surviving characters?

So looking at my story, I agreed to kill this character off. I will not write it now, because it hurts too much. There needs to be a sense of choice in the story, a sense of the character maybe getting off easier. But I won't erase what I've written. I can't save them. No matter what I do, I can't. It fits, and it is going to be sad, but it makes sense.

So I'm sorry, Character, I can't save them. I would if I could, but I can't.

So my good friend Mardra Sikora (check her out here) is asking us all to do a blog hop. I've never participated in a blog hop, but why not? I'll just make it writer-related.

The question that she poses is "What are you grateful for?" So here are ten things that I am grateful for.

Also. Here is a picture of Estes Park. Because it's pretty, and I am also grateful for Estes Park. Always be grateful for Estes Park.

I am grateful for this one time, when I had a character who just took over the story. I still remember sitting there, screaming at my computer going, "Why did you do that?! Why oh why did you do that?! Bad things can only come of this!" It was the opposite of what I thought the character was going to do. But I am so glad he went off track and did what he did, because it taught me that characters (when written correctly) will do what they do, and you lose control over what they do. I've met authors who scoff at this, but think about it: you're creating another living, breathing human. Of course that human is going to spiral out of your control and make his own decisions. Welcome to parenting.

I am grateful for the characters who grabbed my attention in other books and got me interested in writing my own characters. We all have them. For me, it was a workhorse in third grade, a mad scientist in fifth grade, and Harry's godfather in sixth grade (and if I spoiled Harry Potter for you, I'm not sorry, because it's been out for twenty years now). There were others, but these are the guys who leaped out of the pages and throttled me by the neck and said, "Look at us! We're awesome! You can write awesome people, too!" And so I tried to.

I write to music. Who doesn't? But sometimes music means more than just pretty background noise. Sometimes music can teach you how to tell a story and use metaphors and emotions to manipulate the audience to your whim. Cry, audience, cry! Yes, the tears ...

Oh, don't pretend like you aren't excited when people cry at your stuff.

For those of you who don't know Radical Face, you need to. Here's a link. This music taught me how to write short stories just as much as my undergraduate workshops did. See, this guy is a genius and he says so much with so little. Another good one is Josh Ritter. And there's a chock-a-block of amazing storytellers in the weird, warped music my writing partner and best friend in college handed off to me throughout the years. Now when I hear the Decemberists or Avett Brothers or Mountain Goats, I get the itch to write. Honestly, I think the mixes my friend made for me and their inspiration had less to do with the music on the mixes themselves, but more to do with the fact that someone cared enough about me to push me to write and force me to expand my horizons.

And there are a lot of them. First, there was Gramma and Mom, who taught me to read and write when I was two and then taught me how a story is written when I was three. I still remember Gramma and me reading through a Berenstain Bears book, and I asked, "How does the author know when to change paragraphs?"

"Well, he feels it," Gramma said. "I suppose when an author writes so much, he just knows."

"Do you think I could do that?" I asked, and of course my Gramma, who thought I could do anything, said, "Of course. You can do anything."

Mom held me to a high standard, even when I was a kid. At eleven, I was way deep into writing long speculative fiction. Every night, I would hand her a chapter and ask her, "Tell me if you got bored." In the morning, it was like opening up the New York Times to find a review. Actually, it was worse than the Times. My mom was brutal.

"It didn't really pique my attention," she'd say. "And didn't you steal that idea from something else?"

As I grew up, there were teachers that joined the mix. Tracy, who shut the lights off in the room and put the music on and made us open up our imaginations. Brian, who is the main reason why I went into playwriting and shoved myself into DePaul (and got into Stonecoast). David, who gave me an internship and my first published piece. Steinbruck and Jorgenson, who put on my little plays and made me try out for contests that I never won. Christine, who actually believed I could play with the big boys and was worth something. Martinez, John, Don, and now Nancy.

But there were also friends.

Upon arriving in Chicago, I met another playwriting major. She was working on a YA steampunk novel before anyone really knew what steampunk was. Actually, four years later when I first heard the term, I called her and said, "Oh! That's what you were doing!"

She has long moved away and began her next adventure, but those four years we spent in Chicago together were the most formative years of my writing existence. I showed up in the city as a little girl who thought I was weird because I wrote weird stuff, and I left the city with an armful of movies, books, and music to prove to me that I was not alone. She took my writing seriously; sometimes more seriously than me. We actually dropped out of a class together and sat at a coffee shop across the street and discussed different characters and archs and plots and symbols. We believed it all mattered. She believed it all mattered. And because of her, it did matter.

I am not a poet. I will never claim to be a poet. I have friends who are poets, and they are very good. I am not a poet.

That said, you can imagine how painful poetry classes could be for me. I did not get it, I did not want to get it, and I actually spent most of my time in poetry classes learning to be ambidextrous in my notebook as I sat in the back of the class (sorry, Professor, I never said it was a smart move).

But then came 19th Century British Literature. And thus followed Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."

I think "Tintern Abbey" completely revolutionized the content of my writing. It was like someone a hundred and fifty years ago totally got what I felt about the city and how much I missed my home. There's always been a definitive struggle inside of me as a person: to live in the hustle and bustle that will give me opportunity and make me successful, or try to be happy in the countryside that I was born into. Wordsworth didn't give me any closure on that conflict, but he did vocalize it beautifully. Shortly after, I started playing with this juxtaposition of nature versus industrial city, and most of my work since then has had some sort of semblance of that poem.

We all should read more poetry. 

I am grateful for all the little things that help me write. I started off with paper stapled together, and my hand could never keep up with my brain. The fact that laptops exist, they're portable, and they don't weigh as much as a brick now ... all good things for me. Also, chocolate. Because chocolate. And always chocolate.

I'm lucky. I don't work behind a desk. I won't say much about my day job, but I get to create and I get to help others create and that makes me happy.

I always wanted an MFA in Creative Writing, and now I get to have one. But turns out that Stonecoast was the best option and I really lucked out. I know that I'd be miserable writing lit fic and having to quit my job and move across the country to an undisclosed location. It's just not for me right now. But Stonecoast fits in with my life and the people there are writing what I write. Someone's writing steampunk and another is writing adult spec and another is writing solarpunk and another is working on a space opera. How amazing is that?!

I think it's amazing.

Not only is Stonecoast awesome, but I got in. And I had the courage to try for an MFA and I had those recommenders who helped me through the process (Brian, John, Christine, and Jen ... notice they're the teachers who were mentioned earlier). I had support from them and my wonderful Alex, and I did it. I really did it.

I won't talk about it, because I don't want to spoil it. But my current project had this moment where it was being written, and something brilliant happened, and I had that moment where a writer thinks, "Oh. This is actually going to work. This is actually special."

I love that moment. And I am so grateful when it comes. Not all projects get that moment. A lot don't. But if you ever do feel that relief that you have that "spark" in your manuscript, you thank your lucky stars. You didn't just waste the last year of your life typing random words in random order on a random word doc.

So when it happened, I just sat back and smiled. And then I kept writing.

For just the last book I wrote, I know that I have discarded over 1,000 pages of writing.

Since the age of nine, I've worked on about twenty full-length manuscripts and playscripts.

Out of those twenty, about five of them have been published or produced. And honestly, about three of them are stories I would consider awesome and worth anything.

I am always really sad when I write something in vain. I am always really sad when I work on something for a year and then I find out it's trash and I scrap it. But there's always this comfort in knowing that every word I write --- no matter how awful that word was --- propels me forward into growing and maturing as a writer.

I am grateful for all of the words that no one will read. I am grateful for all of the awful, teeth-grating scenes I wrote and slaved over, just to delete them or stick them in a "maybe" folder, just to have that "maybe" folder turn into a "never" folder or a "oh yeah, I forgot this was here" folder. I am grateful for all of the characters who lived so others could live more vibrantly. And I am grateful for all of the misspelled words and weak dialogue and funky chapter breaks that are lost to the times.

Because they made me who I am. They were just one more step in the right direction.

So what are you grateful for?

 If you were a child of the 90′s as I was, you may have noticed an ongoing predicament in those family friendly movies we’d watch in the dark of a theater that didn't have stadium seating or car commercials preceding it: the family friendly movies were more so than not … family deadly.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: Joey/Lisa has become detached/has striven on without/has had to overcome some obstacle because Mom/Dad got cancer/into a car accident on the way to their basketball game after a guilt trip/shot in a convenience store trying to buy gum and gas/just kind of got ill from being so ninetiestastic and died/disappeared/turned into a symbolic framed picture on the mantel.

And it’s not only movies, it’s books too! Check out all of these children’s stories that have one or both parents dead or missing or just out of the picture:

WALL O DEAD, MISSING, OR SEPARATED:
The Lion King
Beauty and the Beast
A Wrinkle in Time
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Harry Potter
Lord of the Rings (Bilbo is incapacitated)
Spiderman
Batman
Island of the Blue Dolphin
Music of the Ocean
Wizard of Oz
Alice in Wonderland
The Great Mouse Detective
An American Tail/Fivel Goes West
Once Upon a Forest
The Jungle Book
101 Dalmatians
The Rescuers
All Dogs Go to Heaven
Annie
Peter Pan
Pinnochio
Cinderella
Snow White
Lassie (90′s Lassie)
Suzy Q


Why is this? Why is it in children’s stories, do we not have a parent?!

The adventure story The Brilliant Adventures of Nelius Hogg explains it pretty well in its opening chapter:

Many stories such as these start off with parents dying. I don’t know why, it just is how it goes. Without the parents dying, the children can’t go on any real adventures, now can they? Parents are stubborn, annoying little pests like that; they always are asking things of you, telling you where to go, how to dress, when to return from where you’ve been. Without parents, children are free to do as they please. This is why many books write them out altogether.

This book is no different, but in a way it is different. Cornelius Hogg’s parents didn’t die; they just simply disappeared.

Children are not like usual readers; they may be reading for another reason. In the real world, children have no power. They are usually always supervised or somehow on their way to being supervised. They don’t get to choose what they eat every night, where they sleep, what they do with their time. They are in school, then at home, then back to school and home, living in a place they can’t change, being influenced by an income they have no control over.

But when these kids can turn to stories, those authority figures can go to the wayside, and they have their freedom to adventure.

While a parent also works as a foil for a child and stands as a symbol for growing up and breaking the bubble, this emancipation almost always leads to some kind of fantastical journey (and usually, we’re reading the book for that journey). Even when Simba’s traumatized over Mufasa’s death, he is forced to venture out on his own and find the oasis where he has many crazy awesome adventures with Timon and Pumbaa. Dorothy leaves her aunt and uncle to go meet the scarecrow, tinman, and lion. Alice is pulled from her sister by a white rabbit. Harry Potter’s parents’ death, no matter how terrible it was and how he wishes for them to be alive, are in fact the reason why he is the boy who lived. The characters may not be happy about this decision to toff off their mom and dad, but we sure are. Imagine how boring and/or nonexistent a good eighty five percent of our YA literature would not exist if James’s parents weren’t eaten by that rhinocerous, or Mowgli’s parents hadn’t been eaten by Shere Khan … (oh man, there’s a lot of eatery here).

It is through literature kids find some kind of freedom. But in order to do such adventures, the authority has to be out of the way. It removes them from obligation and it also removes them from supervision.

See? The Rugrats parents weren’t being irresponsible and worthy of child protective services! They were just liberating their children to explore imaginative independence!