Heroine size

 

Blooorgh.  Another tied-to-my-chair evening.  I got very tired dancing with hellhounds last night at snack time* and then the alarm went off in the middle of the night the way it does every Sunday morning.  BLOOOORGH.  And I made a pig's ear of calling plain bob doubles at service ring (arrrgh) and was then mugged at the florist's, in my dazed, half-awake state, because it's what they call 'mothering Sunday' over here** and a lot of wild-eyed people were getting stuck in doorways in their haste to buy a bunch of daffodils or a dozen semi-perfect roses.  I spent most of the afternoon in the garden at the cottage and then came back to the mews to have tea with Georgiana, who is also in publishing and is nearly as old as I am, and we agreed in our elderly, rheumatic way that we rather like the internet and the web, even when it complicates everything and probably creates a hell of a lot of extra work, and that direct contact with the author is . . . well, it's direct contact with the author, and there isn't anything else like it, and publishers have been promoting us as well as our books pretty much since Gutenberg, and when we aren't unprofessionally losing our rag in the way that the keyboard and the 'send' button make altogether too easy and seductive, I believe that the internet is also a very excellent and powerful anti-Othering device.  And you know about me and Othering.

            So, speaking of direct contact with the author, we haven't had an Ask Robin in a long time, which is to say I haven't talked about writing in a while.  Because I keep getting distracted by bells or yarn or something.***  And I wanted to respond to a thread in the forum that was the result of my moaning about some hapless reader writing to tell me I need to tell more stories about tall awkward heroines because mine are all short.†  So while this isn't exactly an Ask Robin it's pretty much out of the same box. 

SEMI SPOILER ALERT

You guys who still haven't read OUTLAWS, you really need to get with the programme.  But if you haven't, go knit a hellhound square or something and come back in a couple of paragraphs.

             To all of you who have written to say that you thought Cecily was short . . . Remember what she DOES.  She would have to be built like a weight-lifter to do what she does physically . . . unless she's, well, not short.  She's middling tall—and she's probably still built like a weight-lifter, after all that quarterstaff work and so on—and needs to be.  And yes, everybody looks short next to her mentor.  But have you ever tried to lift and carry an adult human body in your arms?  Especially a floppy, wounded adult human body you're trying not to damage any farther?  Adrenalin only works so far.  Not short.  Cecily is not short.

              This is one of my permanent dilemmas as a writer of Girls Who Do Things.  There are limits on the sheer physical mixing-it-up-with-the-guys when you throw a woman into the melee—or of the possibilities within extreme situations generally, as for example what Cecily finds herself in at the fair.  Harry HAS to be enormous to face up against Corlath and Thurra the way she does.  Granted I didn't know this going in—the story is the story—but it's something you have to deal with in certain kinds of plotlines.  Cecily has to be big and strong enough to carry her injured friend. ††

              I tend to think of my heroines in terms of my own height—which is another limitation, if you like, but it's also grounding.  It's one of the things that makes them real to me, and that therefore gives me the ability to make them feel real to you:  Harry is taller than I am.  Sylvi is shorter than I am.  Some of them I'm not sure about:  I don't do any more physical description than I have to in a story, and that includes trying to find out stuff about my characters I don't need to know, if it doesn't just arrive with the storyline, whether or not it goes down on the page.  I don't like a lot of brown-hair-piercing/faded/bright-blue-eyes-and-a-scar-just-under-the-left-ear type of description either as writer or reader;  I feel characters live on the page better without it, and tend to stumble over paragraphs of it in other writers' stories.††  This is one of the reasons I blew it about Jake, who is mixed-race (his mum is either half or quarter black:  speaking of not always knowing things about characters), but I never found a way to put this in that didn't have Hi!  I'm making a liberal POINT here! written all over it, because I'm an author who doesn't physically describe her characters,††† and you could say I didn't have the muscles, having not had my character-describing quarterstaff training.‡

              . . . It's always something.‡‡  And I'm getting to the post-articulate phase of Sunday night on too little sleep Saturday.  Sorry.  I'm sure there's a conclusion I should be making about character elucidation.  But . . . blooooorgh.   

* * *

* Hey, they ate.  Whatever works.

** 'Mothering'?  What is that supposed to mean?  It's your mum's day.  Mother your mother?  Give her a lot of advice she doesn't want and then make her put on a sweater because you think it's cold.  Ask her if she's taken her vitamins.  Tell her she can do better than her current boy/girlfriend.  And get that dog off the furniture. 

*** I have snakeshead fritillaries for the first time in three years.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritillaria_meleagris   Neither the slugs nor the lily beetles nor the alien raiders from Antares got them this year.  They're a wild flower, right?  You see them in unkempt lawns and the fringes of forests and things.  And they've disappeared three years in a row in my little walled town garden.  This year?  I have them in pots on the front steps.    Fritillaries aren't supposed to like pots any better than snowdrops do.  And I adore them and it's been breaking my heart that I can't seem to grow them.  This was a gesture of final despairing resort.  YAAAAAAAAAAY.  —And I have quite a few of them.  At least if mentioning it doesn't mean the Antareans lay them waste tonight after all.  But this is the best crop I've had since moving into town.  YAAAAAAAAAAAY.   

† Grrrrrrrrrrr etc. 

†† And Sylvi has to be small enough for the end of Chapter Five.  

††† One of the reasons I don't read romances is because the customary deluge of physical description starts sapping my will to live.  Although the main reason is that with the exception of Georgette Heyer I don't think romance is ever a plot.  It's something happening while the plot is thundering ahead elsewhere.  Hey, I think PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is only okay.  Sue me.  

‡ Rule of the universe:  every choice has a downside. 

‡‡ I had various helpful people make suggestions, like the old character-looking-in-the-mirror thing.  I HATE THE CHARACTER LOOKING IN THE MIRROR THING.  Just by the way.  I did it myself in BEAUTY and there are (other) examples out there that work in their individual contexts.  But generally speaking . . . no.  No, no, no. no, no. 

‡‡  Insert pile of PEG II pages here.