Saturday, April 18, 2009

Is my heroine messed up because I am?

I've been working on a scene which is the first time the hero and heroine meet up for any length of time. I have based her reaction to him on something I used to go through in college. For some reason I have only sort of figured out, I used to be really rude to extraordinarily good-looking guys. If they flirted with me, my reaction was  really dismissive.  "Yeah, whatever." I always liked ordinary looking guys and even sort of ugly ones. So, drawing on that feeling, my heroine, Anna, is rather stressed about having to deal with Tip, the attractive hero. BTW, I've described him as having a "lived-in" face--not plastic model handsome, so he ought to be approachable by the average female.

If I want to use that feeling for my heroine, I need to figure out why she feels this way and how she overcomes (or doesn't) the tendency to flee any attractive male.  She is not me, so her reason has more to do with her father, whom one of my most precious friends has called "the Adonis of Academia." I told her I was going to steal that phrase and use it in my book. (See my previous post about writers being thieves.) Her relationship with her father is problematic.

But another question for me, because I am who I am, is how much of my heroine is me? How much of myself is being revealed on the pages I blithely hand around at my critique group? My readers may end up knowing me better than I know myself...whether or not my heroine is me.

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