The Woman in the Story Read online

  A Survivor Heroine, who has endured unbearable loss, sometimes identifies with the Incomplete Heroine when she has achieved closure but is left feeling empty inside. It’s like the desolation after the storm. Now the actual trauma has taken place, the rebuilding needs to begin.

  Of all the different ways a character can identify with a role choice, probably the Incomplete Heroine is the most frequent. We all have inadequacies, insecurities, losses, hang-ups, and unfulfilled needs. From “shopaholicism” to sex addiction, we can compensate for inner emptiness in many ways. An Incomplete Heroine’s problems tend to dominate her story. Her inner need is her true goal.

  Questing Heroines

  Leaders, saints, seekers of justice, police investigators and lawyers, warriors, vengeance seekers, and murderers are the most obvious types of questing heroines. Quests can be creative, physical, occupational, spiritual, and medical, anything where a tangible result can be achieved by effort and tenacity. The drive of these heroines is to seek a result in the outside world. They have clear external goals that drive their story. These heroines dominate the genres in which high stakes are everything. If the heroine doesn’t solve the problem, there will be more deaths, wars, corruption, and bad guys having their way. Sometimes the quests are relatively small in scope but not significance. In Julie and Julia, both Julie and Julia are heroines who are feeling incomplete and unfulfilled. Julia Child is an embassy official’s wife with too much time on her hands in Paris, and Julie has a harrowing day job and a big sense of failure in comparison to her high-achieving girlfriends. Julia goes on a quest to learn cooking, leading her to fulfil her ambition of having her French cookery book published. Julie goes on a quest to write a blog, using Julia Child’s entire recipe collection over a year.

  Often Questing Heroines are queens who seek to retain power against insurmountable odds. Elizabeth I in Elizabeth and Victoria in The Young Victoria embark on quests to prove themselves as worthy monarchs. The loss of anything resembling a normal woman’s life may lead them to feeling incomplete, but the quest is a dominant drive in them. As they develop leadership skills during the quest, we watch them grow into legendary women.

  TV is full of Questing Heroines in any crime-related genre, for example, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Medium, Damages, and Weeds. Even the Desperate Housewives have a mission to find out the truth about their friend’s death in season 1. There’s always a huge amount of learning on the job, and many of them begin as Outsider Heroines or Incomplete Heroines before they find their quest.

  The morality of the Questing Heroine can often be a big question. Do her means justify her ends? Does she compromise or sacrifice her true nature in order to obtain her desired result? Then there is the common inner female Conflict of being too many things to too many people. Can she meet the domestic and relationship needs of loved ones as well as the external task? Maria in Maria Full of Grace rejects the universal demands on her as sister, daughter, provider, and employee in order to try and meet her own needs. Conventional notions of heroism can be upheld by the Questing Heroine, more so than any other heroine role choice, where “saving the self ” can often come before saving others. But even for the highest-minded heroines, there’s usually a sting in the tail of heroism. Take Erin in Erin Brockovich. If she saves a community, she will fail her family. Which does she sacrifice?

  Your heroine will relate to the Questing Heroine when she gives herself a mission. How she goes about achieving it will depend on her needs and sense of identity.

  Tip for Writing the Heroine Role Choice

  Think about how your heroine might start out as one kind of heroine, and as she resolves issues, she evolves into another kind of heroine. Remember Precious? She starts out as a Survivor and Outsider, but ends up as a Questing Heroine, determined to get her children and bring them up on her terms. Rose in Titanic starts out as a Questing Heroine on the boat, goes back in time to being an Incomplete Heroine needing love, and ends up a Survivor as the boat sinks. Back to the present again, Rose’s quest to feel reunited with Jack is fulfilled.

  The Heroine Role Choice in Close-Up

  La Vie en Rose

  Edith is in a small French town’s square with her father, who is performing contortionist tricks to get enough money for food and shelter that night. Edith is a Survivor and Outsider Heroine, whose very life has been threatened by deprivation ever since birth. The townspeople are laughing at her father, much to Edith’s humiliation, and his act is not attracting many tips. When someone asks her father if his little girl performs, Edith squirms with fear about exposure. Sensing a chance to make more money, Edith’s father urgently orders her to do something fast, before the crowd disperses. In a ft of panic, Edith sings La Marsellaise, with a beautiful and clear voice. Soon the crowd is mesmerized and deeply impressed. As the townspeople dig deep in their pockets for Edith, the little girl is flooded with her first-ever feeling of pride and achievement. Edith has found her talent, one that will make her Edith Piaf. Later, as a drug-addicted adult and an Incomplete Heroine, she will always rely on her talent to help her feel whole.

  THE ROLE CHOICE OF NURTURER

  Women “mother.” It’s what we are all trained to do from day one. And “mothering” — loving, feeding, cleaning, tending, caring, and being totally alert and immediately responsive to the needs of others — is the essential job description for the role choice of Nurturer. Out of all the role choices, it has the most powerful influence over women’s lives. The role choice of Nurturer is when your heroine puts another character or other characters’ needs first, often at the expense of her own. As women are conditioned by culture to do this without blinking, this role choice is central to most heroines’ sense of identity. But this doesn’t mean your heroine is necessarily any good at it, or even enjoys it! How to look after her own needs can be a woman’s biggest dilemma.

  The Nurturer includes mothers, childcare workers, caretakers, nurses, or anyone whose role, vocation, or motivation is to tend to the emotional and physical needs of others. A heroine chooses the role choice of Nurturing for a variety of reasons, such as the need to build a family, have a certain job, or simply be the one that everyone turns to for emotional support and care taking. Nurturing can be pleasurable, satisfying, or the complete opposite for your heroine. She might buck against the expectation to look after others and be completely hopeless, or she might take it in her stride and accept it as one of her normal roles in life. The two main different kinds of Nurturer are Mother and Sorority.

  Mother

  The universal expectation for women to mother is exactly why heroines who are mothers very often lead stories that focus on being a mother. Her parenting is central to the story and her characterization. The heroine who happens to be a mother but has a story that has nothing to do with her being a parent is a rare creature. In the opposite direction, a childless female character over forty years old who doesn’t have any issues about not having children is equally absent on our screens. In the vast majority of stories, a heroine/mother’s whole identity is bound up with her mothering. Whether you think that women are the natural caretakers, or if you believe the expectations of women to do the lion’s share of the hands-on parenting are simply a division of gender roles, your attitude as writer is going to filter down into your characterization. So it’s good to be aware of some the issues. The role choice of Mother will mean very different things to a character that is young and immature with no interest in nurturing her baby like Sherry in SherryBaby to an infertile woman in her forties like Julia Child in Julie and Julia.

  Loving It

  There’s always the overwhelming feeling of love when a heroine and her partner are ready to have a child and create a family. One of my favorite movie moments is the Mr. Napkin Head scene in The Holiday, in which Amanda discovers that the man she is deeply attracted to is a widower with two young daughters. As they all drink cocoa and joke around at the table, the subtext is all about Amanda’s emotional ability to let these
two little girls into her life by becoming their stepmom. If you believe in the primitive maternal instinct or not, the intense joy of being a parent is undeniable. It is the hardest job, but it is also the most rewarding. Most women and men do their best for their children, even when their best falls short. The adaptation to the role choice of Mother is long and all-consuming; the call to love and protect her children will change your heroine’s identity and life forever more.

  A difficult Job

  To cope with mothering well, a woman needs emotional and practical support, and someone looking out for her needs. But how often does this happen, in reality? In stories, hardly ever! A woman’s capacity to be a good mother is either idolized (Changeling) or demonized (every film with a bad mother, of which there are many). Every human being needs a nurturer, and those who mother others need it most. In our society, who cares for the caretaker? How do mothers — or men who mother — get their needs met? Stories are coming round to acknowledge the real challenges of motherhood. In Monsters Ball, Letitia takes her misery out on her son. In Mamma Mia! Donna is burnt out by years of single motherhood and “nurturing” her hotel and her daughter, but she has no one to look after her needs. Something’s Gotta Give explores the dilemma of the older heroine who is a mother. She is fancied by a younger man while she is forming an unconscious attraction to a man her own age who has been dating her daughter!

  Mothering, unsupported and isolated, is bad for a woman’s mental health. We were supposed to raise children in communities, not lonely domestic units. It’s a known fact that in nations where women can earn money, live autonomously, and have control over their fertility, the birth rate drops. Women’s needs in coping with motherhood can be played down on screen, so watch out for romanticizing or gorgonizing your heroine/mother by making her responsible for all her children’s hang-ups.

  If you’re writing a heroine/mother, think outside the box of received wisdom to make her memorable or real. In The Edge of Love, about Dylan Thomas’ two great loves, the tiny children of the two heroines are in practically every scene. The film is surprisingly truthful about the drudgery and exhaustion of having a child on your hip all day, and the support that women have to give each other. On the upside, Weeds has a great deal of fun with the challenges of a multitasking widowed single mom of two sons, while she runs a marijuana drug-dealing business.

  Maternal Guilt

  You might want to explore this aspect of your heroine’s identity as a mother because every mother feels it! The pressure to mother well is huge and often unrealistic. Women can feel there’s something wrong with them if they aren’t very good at it. Most mothers have bad days, resent their children, and take stress out in fits of maternal meltdown. Nobody wants to lose it but almost everybody does. It’s a logical response to a situation in which you have to take care of everyone else first. This is a major issue for most women, as The Rebound shows, when a single mom realizes her young son walks in on her having sex with a man he doesn’t know. Divine Secrets of the Ya -Ya Sisterhood show a mother burdened with maternal guilt for years because she was an alcoholic and abusive to her children. The Duchess shows a mother unable to leave her children to be with her supportive lover despite her horrible life with her cold husband.

  Biology of Mothering

  Child birth is hardly ever written in an empowering way, a way in which a woman takes control of her own processes. Lots of women squat, kneel, go deeply inward, talk to the baby, and do stretching exercises with partners helping them, but these images are more likely to be seen on a documentary about indigenous women than your local multiplex on a Saturday night. Birthing in the West has been overmedicalized so a heroine lying back and screaming with a medical gown has become the acceptable cliché. Birth is sometimes shot from the women’s point of view, but more often it is not. For something really extreme (and funny) check out the birth scenes in TranSylvania in which three filthy gypsies brandish a dirty knife between the legs of the terrified heroine.

  Infertility is a deeply felt wound in women and men. In a world that glorifies motherhood through a bombardment of media images, it is hard for the infertile woman not to be reminded daily about her plight or to consider herself a failure or, worse, an outsider. A fertility-challenged character is Julia Child’s in Julie and Julia. Her passion for cooking could be a compensatory need to nurture, but Nora Ephron’s characterization does not stigmatize Julia’s infertility.

  Stepmoms

  They have a really raw deal in stories. As the number of step-moms probably increases every day, it’s time for some new visions. For a start, many birth mothers do have “issues” with the fact that the father of their children has moved on. This can lead to women sabotaging — consciously or unconsciously — their children’s relationship with a stepmom, as in Stepmom. Some birth mothers justify this by believing they are simply protecting their children from something that might threaten their stability, but sometimes it can be about loss of power and a need to get back at the ex. The worse-case scenario is when a father is alienated from his children because of the mother’s propaganda. The evil stepmother of fairytales could just be the unfair recipient of negative projections for centuries. Where are the men while the battle rages? Often they are somewhere in the middle, trying to keep both sides happy.

  This is not to say that some stepmoms can be highly inadequate, jealous, and insecure. They might exclude the children from the new life and make them feel like second-class citizens. It might suit a stepmom very well that her man’s baggage from the past is out of sight. If the children are lucky, they will have a mature mother and stepmother who understand relationships are a two-way process.

  Rejecting It

  Whatever your views on abortion, it’s still a story taboo. Isn’t there some irony about the silence and fear around the issue when so many masculine stories condone the taking of life, such as torture, murder, and death? But many women have abortions, and probably every woman in the West knows someone close who’s had one. Like all taboos, the lid blows off at some point, due to the rising pressure of being ignored. In recent years abortion has been explored in Vera Drake, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and now The Edge of Love. Out of the three, The Edge of Love is the most down to Earth. One woman lends another money for the operation, and then comes round after to support her. It’s all set in 1940s Wales, and the whole thing is illegal, but it is done without any stigmatization.

  If you are writing about an abortion decision faced by your heroine, and she goes through with it, you will have to confront all your paranoia about her likability and the unlikely odds of it ever making it to the screen. Even if abortion only features in your heroine’s backstory, it’s useful to know how your heroine would handle an unwanted pregnancy and who would support her.

  Abandoners

  If your heroine has for whatever reason decided to abandon her children, you risk working in cliché-infested waters or being something of a pioneer if you just keep it in her backstory. Women, for a whole variety of personal reasons, fee the family nest. Some never come back. It’s generally okay to have a male hero who has some kids in the background. His lack of involvement may not be a major issue for him. It’s not the same for heroine/mothers. But there are many women who don’t feel able to raise their children. Sometimes issues from childhood are reawakened when a mother has children, and these seriously undermine her capacity to care. Some women have full-scale psychotic breakdowns after birth and never develop a deep bond with their child. The mother who left and it’s no big heartache or not central to her story is an exceptionally rare breed. She doesn’t have to be unlikeable, maybe things just didn’t work out. Maybe her ex was the better nurturer. It is still a huge deal for women to leave their children, so central to a woman’s identity is the role of Nurturer.

  Sorority

  The Sorority is shorthand for the huge variety of female collectives and your heroine’s need (or not) to be part of a group of females. The role choice of Sorority is
a regular feature in heroines’ stories because it represents women’s need to share, empathize, connect, and feel understood. Women can have strong needs to communicate and affiliate, more than men. Women can have an intuitive empathy with each other, even if they don’t like to admit it.

  Your task with the Sorority role choice is to work out if your heroine feels a need to sometimes be with other women to give and get emotional support. Does she have a sorority in her life and how does she relate to it? You can see the role choice of Sorority in all genres from comedies to thrillers.

  Supportive Sorority

  This is the bunch of friends who pat your heroine on the back, listen to her woes, lick her wounds, and put her back on her feet. They are the friends to whom your heroine can bare her soul and not feel judged. They probably know her better than she knows herself. They know all your heroine’s past boyfriends and will patiently listen to all her relationship trials and tribulations. They are there for your heroine, whatever time of the day or night. The Sorority role choice is often found in comedies, romantic comedies, dramantic comedies, and dramedies. Obviously Sex and the City is based on this role choice as the four friends need each other as much as their relationships with men. But the Supportive Sorority isn’t all a bed of roses. Because they know your heroine so well, they can also give her a hard time. Or, love of a man can come between members, and suddenly they become rivals. Female friendships can get incredibly intense because of this ability to share and open up but can turn nasty quite quickly.

  Campaigning and Protective Sororities

  If you believe that women don’t have equal status in society, then you might want to show your heroine making the Sorority role choice in order to empower herself, particularly when she’s been treated badly by men. She might seek out a protective Sorority to help her. Then there are all the women-led organizations to support women such as incest, rape, and domestic violence survivor groups. Your heroine may need one of these or may have experienced the support of one of these in her backstory. Women’s political groups abound. The women of most countries wouldn’t have the right to vote without the struggles and sacrifices of organized groups of women. If you’re a female writer, you might well be a member of Women in Film and TV, which aims to break down the glass ceiling in our industry.