Extraordinary
Heroes Found in Ordinary Places
Guest Post
By: Author Bill Blais
First, my deep thanks to Annabell
for taking a chance on my story and on me with this guest post. It is much
appreciated.
It may sound weird, but I started
writing the Kelly & Umber series because I was tired of reading about
strong, sexy, smart, bold protagonists who always won. I wanted failures.
Well, okay, not failures exactly,
but people who might actually exist, who fell down, who made real mistakes with
real consequences. People who have to buy groceries.
It's not that super heroes aren't
fun sometimes*, but they tend not to have to do the dishes or pay bills or mow
the lawn, and -- perhaps most importantly and oddly -- they tend not to have
any family. This is more important to me now with a wife and child of my own,
but it has always bothered me about popular fiction, undermining my engagement
with many of these heroes and heroines.
I began to notice that in today's
fiction, particularly genre fiction, very few protagonists have siblings, fewer
still have parents, and almost none are married or have children.
Why is that? Are mothers, for
example, incapable of strength? Sexuality? Intelligence? Confidence?
Please. Every mother is all these
things and more.**
So why aren’t they in the stories?
I think this is because it's
messier. Situations are so much easier to write through when the main character
doesn't have to worry about the web of obligations and needs and fears and
hopes that being part of a family produces.
A heroine can shoot off to an exotic
locale at a moment's notice when there are no children to worry about, no
parents to care for, no husband to bother with. It's easy to gloss over the
day-to-day details and stick with the action (and there are plenty of great
examples of this), but I am more drawn to the ways in which normal people rise
to challenges, and the normal people I know have to clean the litter box and
take sick kids to the doctor and so on.
Now, a person who does these things
and still kicks some demon butt? That's my kind of hero.
But writing that kind of hero was a
constant exercise in resistance. Though Kelly's character and story came to me
quite quickly, I found myself time and again wondering if my choices to avoid
the trends of the genre were more stubborn obstinacy than grounded in her
story.
The most obvious example of this, without giving away too much,
was dealing with potential love interests for Kelly. She is a married woman
very much in love with her husband and her kids. This, by itself, flies in the
face of nearly every book in the field and greatly complicates, at best, one of
the major draws of reading the story.
Instead of the traditional love triangle*** with the brooding
lovers competing for the lady's favors, I had tied Kelly down to one man from
the outset, and one with a severe illness, making any other relationships for
her rather questionable, at the very best. So where would the passion or
mystery be?
Now, I said 'tied down' above, but Kelly's love for her husband is
clear and open, not based on pity or obligation, and he returns it in kind.
Thus, the 'limitation' I had put upon myself was actually an opportunity. I
hoped to show a married couple who was genuinely in love, as much now as when
they had first met, contrary to what I saw as popular depictions of married
life.
Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, "Happy families are all alike;
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The implication is that
happy families are inherently uninteresting, and here I was, explicitly
incorporating a happy family -- and, if Tolstoy was correct, boredom -- to my
story. I have always resisted this perception, however, and now I had a chance
to prove it (or try to, at least).
But would readers care?
This question haunted me as I worked through my revisions. I really
enjoyed who Kelly was and who she was becoming, but she wasn't like any of the
heroines in the genre that I'd seen or read about. Had I gone too far? I liked
her, but would anyone else want to read about a woman with such mundane
problems as PTA meetings and a kid with a broken arm, even with the addition of
demons?
It was the classic new author dilemma, I think: Do I write what I
think people want to read, or do I write the story I want to read? The standard
response is to write the story you want to write, but that seems to straddle
both sides of the question without really answering it.
I'll be honest, I hope someday to make a living writing stories,
so I am keenly aware of my potential audience. Was I shooting myself in the
foot, then, by taking such a departure from the genre?
In the end, and supported in great part by my wife, I remembered
why I had started writing No
Good Deed, and, perhaps more importantly, why I started writing in the
first place: I wanted to write stories that I would enjoy.
I can't make people like my books
any more than a painter can force people to appreciate her art, and I believe a
novel created by formula has the same appeal as a color by numbers picture. I
like people and stories who make hard choices, and I can only do my best to be
honest to the stories as I discover them.
* Seriously, who doesn't want to kick butt and win the guy or
girl?
** When my wife was 10 months pregnant she could still kick my
butt. No question.
*** There's an odd thought: Is there such a thing as a
'traditional' love triangle?
About the Author: Bill Blais is a writer, web developer and perennial part-time college instructor. His novels includeWitness (winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Fantasy) and the first two books in the Kelly & Umber series(No Good Deed and Hell Hath No Fury).
Bill graduated from Skidmore College before earning an MA in Medieval Studies from University College London. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.
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