barbara samuel

Creating Strong Female Protagonists

April 22, 2015 By Barbara O'Neal

I’ve been happily immersed in the new seasons of Outlander and Game of Thrones, as I’m sure many of you are. I also recently binge-watched every available episode of The Fall, a wildly popular BBC thriller.

The trio of shows have many things in common, but as I’ve been pulling together a talk about female protagonists, I noticed in particular that all three of these shows boast very powerful female protagonists, some of my favorite in recent years. Stella, in The Fall, is a British police detective, called into a Belfast police department to help solve a crime. Claire, in Outlander, is a WWII era nurse who finds herself back in time in Scotland in the 18th century. Daenerys Targaryen, in Game of Thrones, is the last of a line of of royals who ruled dragons. The dragons have been extinct for hundreds of years, and it appears her family line is going to be extinct as well. (There are many examples of strong females in GoT, but I’m going with my personal favorite.) I’m going to use them as examples here, but don’t worry, there are no big spoilers. I’m only speaking in general terms.

What are the steps to creating a strong female protagonist? What are the pitfalls? How do men and women protagonists differ?

She has goals for herself.
Stella, in The Fall, wants to catch a serial killer
Claire, in Outlander, wants to get home

She is conflicted.
Stella is thwarted by officials, by her own nature, which we’ll go into in a minute, and by the killer himself

Claire wants to return to her husband in the twentieth century, but she also falls wildly in love with a Highlander she is forced to marry.

Daenerys faces many many challenges over time, but her first is survival, which means making peace with the barbarian king, and winning him over.

[pullquote]One of the great flaws I see in female protagonists is that they are often so very good.[/pullquote]

She acts to reach her goals.
In other words, she doesn’t just let events happen. She makes a decision to go forward and then faces the consequences of those actions, right or wrong. Claire makes bad choices for the 18th century at times and is beaten for it, but she doesn’t cower afterward and feel apologetic. No, she’s furious and stands up for her own beliefs, even when others don’t agree with her.

Stella is a complex character, but one of the things that makes her very interesting is her unapologetic sexual tastes. When she sees a detective on the street changing his shirt, she gives him her hotel room number, and he comes to have sex with her, but the whole thing is kind of bewildering to him because the culture is still quite sexist in the way Catholic countries often are. When she’s later questioned about him and asked what he was doing there, she says clearly and without apology, “Sexual intercourse.”

We don’t expect that. Her fellow officers really don’t expect it. She refuses to apologize for having the tastes she has.

When Daenerys is married off to a barbarian king, she’s nothing more than a beautiful child. But as sometimes will happen, she bonds with him, [Read more…]

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Letter to My Aspiring Writer Self

July 23, 2014 By Barbara O'Neal

I posted this to A Writer Afoot a month or so ago, but I’m getting ready to to to the Romance Writers of America conference, thinking about all these things, and I thought many of you would enjoy, too.

Dear New, Young, Passionate, Painfully Aspiring Writer Self:

I am looking at you with great tenderness. Your passion for your craft, your hunger for publication, your commitment to continue to try makes my heart swell with pride. It is not easy, what you’re doing, writing, or rather, writing with the full intent to publish. It’s easy to write if you are doing it only for yourself. It’s only a joy, then, a secret pleasure, a tattoo on your inner thigh that you share only with your most intimate associates.

Writing for publication is a much more dangerous and challenging undertaking. It means risking your ego and your standing in the community. People don’t understand your desire, even those you expect to understand, like reader friends and your librarian. Oh, I know how you’ve learned to dread that question at gatherings. You say you are a writer and someone says with excitement, “Are you published?” You have to say no, and watch their eyes dim and their attention stray. [Read more…]

The Perplexing Problem of Romance

June 25, 2014 By Barbara O'Neal

I spent much of the winter and spring writing a non-fiction project, Writing Romantic Fiction, which will be published in November by Hachette/Macmillan. I was approached to do the project some time ago, and agreed to do it because it seemed like it would be a good exercise for me, and because it’s good to have something to offer at workshops.

What I didn’t realize is how much soul-searching it would trigger, both about process and how it works and why and but also about the role of romance and romantic novels in my life and in the great flow of books. I love the genre, and writing about it helped me to understand why. Love is important. Not just romantic love, of course, but romantic love can be a great and powerful blessing. Falling in love is a magical, amazing feeling that I would want everyone in the world to experience. Finding a partner—a true helpmate and lover who sees you and understands you and is willing to travel the path of life with you—is wonderful.

And yet, romance novels continue to be the most disdained of all genres. Often not just disdained or dismissed, but reviled with an unbridled hatred that oozes and splutters.

Why is that? Serious question.

Genre novels such as mysteries or science fiction are often dismissed, but they are not often reviled the way romance novels are. Why is it so much more ridiculous or ignorant to read and write romance novels than something like Game of Thrones or the latest gory offering from Patricia Cornwell?

When I first began writing romances, it was the mid-eighties and women were still wearing power suits to make their way in an often hostile business world, afraid to show the slightest bit of femininity for fear of being seen as weak, so I understood that by writing romantic fiction, I’d have to accept that some derision would be part of what I would have to grapple with. I lived with it. I didn’t like it, especially when well-meaning friends and relatives and even sometimes readers would say, “So when are you going to put this talent of yours to work on something important?” As if I was slumming there in romance, working on my craft until I could do something good with it. [Read more…]

The Artifacts of Everyday Life

January 22, 2014 By Barbara O'Neal

We have lost Christopher Robin’s mother recently, and her estate and all her things must be settled. CR is back in England taking care of it. As you read this, I will photo-83 be on my way. It’s been challenging to stick to my writing schedule, worrying and feeling the upheaval, and that was my first thought for today’s blog—that I would talk about getting work done, making progress even when life turns upside down.

But it would be false because I haven’t been writing very much at all. I couldn’t tell you what I have been doing except taking a lot of walks and cooking like a crazy person. One night I sat down to a genuinely beautiful bowl of French onion soup, which happens to be one of my favorite comfort foods. The broth is a rich, deep vegetarian stock I’ve finally perfected after months of trying, the depth imparted by very slowly carmelized onions, and I was quite pleased as I admired it in the soup. Then I realized that I’d also baked the bread, a simple French bread that doesn’t keep well, so I make several baguettes and cut them in half and freeze them for later.

Such a cook I am! I thought to myself, digging in.

What has that to do with writing? It has a lot to do with my writing, actually. I seem to find stories in food and nourishment and the way we bring food to each other, the way we feed and coddle each other, the way some of us cook to heal or think or find connection to the simple act of feeding ourselves, creating something all in an hour or a day.

Cooking is what I do when I’m sad or lonely or need to think about a book—all of which I’ve felt here and there over the past week.

I’ve been thinking about the stories women leave behind, and how we can find them. I made sure CR knew to put aside all the photos until I got there, but I forgot to tell him to leave the kitchen alone. I want the chance to go through her cookbooks and recipes, make sure to gather her recipes, the ones she wrote by hand, anything that her mother might have written down, all the tidbits and notes women tuck into their cookbooks. I don’t mean this to be sexist in anyway, but Gina was of a generation that took pride in cakes prepared just so for summer gatherings, and fluffy white rice dotted with fresh green peas.

Imagine my distress when I learned that CR’s brother had been in the kitchen all day today, “throwing things away.” My dismay must have been written all over my face (we were Skyping), because he hurried to add, “The good news is, I’ve traded a tea set for stories from a WREN in the war.” [Read more…]

No Limits: The Emerging New Adult Market

November 27, 2013 By Barbara O'Neal

One of the hottest topics in commercial fiction is the New Adult market. It’s on blogs and in marketing newsletters and all over Twitter. Editors and agents are hot on the trail of the next big writer/book. The very successful trio of Colleen Hoover, Jamie McGuire and Abbi Glines just spent a few weeks touring for their new titles, and the crowds were enormous.

All of this success leads to everyone trying to pin down the market, box it up neatly, pronounce it to be THIS , not THAT. I understand where the impulse comes from—if writers understand what it is, they can write it. If publishers understand it, they can offer the next bestseller.

But all too often what happens with that impulse is that it bleeds all the life out of an emerging form, making it all too similar so that everyone gets tired of it, or thinks they know what it is. The packaging all ends up looking alike. The tropes all start to sound the same. Remember “chick lit”? It began as a perfectly legitimate exploration of how young women, usually in their mid-to-late twenties, started their work lives. The questions posed were often excellent: how do you find work you really love? Do you work or get married or both? How do you know a good man when you find one? How can you afford to look halfway decent on a budget of $0 after rent?

Then the powers that be came along and someone decided chick lit should be silly and have cartoon covers and be all about…shoes.

What?

Of course that killed it. Who wanted to read books about airhead women spending too much money on shoes? Before that happened, there were some excellent books published, about women learning to live with their bodies and dump bad guys and be happy at work. Good stuff. Important stuff, stuff we’ve all dealt with.

Now here comes New Adult, which is not, first of all a “genre.” Kait Nolan says it very well: “NA is not even a genre, in my opinion. It’s an audience, an age bracket. And within that audience or age bracket, you have every other ACTUAL genre. Romance. Mysteries. Sci Fi. Urban Fantasy. Contemporary. Whatever.”

It is a very, very, very new market.

The books first began to show up as self-published phenomenons, including Colleen Hoover’s Slammed, self published in January of 2012. (I found it quite touching to read her blog from the beginning of the journey, starting with the first day of publication. Tammara Webber’s Easy (1,500 reviews), originally published May 25, 2012 and Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster (3900 reviews) I couldn’t find the original pub date on that one, but it was in the same general time frame.

There are many more, many many many more, and some of the writers are young. Emma Hart (Second Chance Summer) for example, is 20 years old and has published 10 books (along with raising two very small children!). The books absolutely exploded, and New York took notice, signing all three of the above authors (plus many others!) to books that were published before the end of that year.

That means not even quite two full years.

The fact that these books were originally self-published has a great deal to do with their power. [Read more…]