Writer’s Cut: Ginny In Stay Standing
This one is a lot harder to write. I think, to properly write a discourse on Ginny in Stay Standing, I have to admit to a couple of things.
First of all, the Ginny at the beginning of Stay Standing has a much different characterization than the Ginny at the end of Stay Standing. I wrote this story over years of time and grew both as a writer and as a person. And sometimes the person I was when I wrote her was ugly and bitter at the start. I freely admit that.
When I first started writing Stay Standing, my relationship with one of my sisters was very... strained, and she reminded me of Ginny very much, and that reflects heavily in this piece. I was a little 18 year old when I first began this story and I was much more prone to allowing my personal emotions to affect my writing process back then.
I had a lot of people ask for this, actually. Ginny is the hardest person to write for me, to be honest. The reasons are pretty complicated, but mostly it comes down to the fact that she is probably the only character who I can not empathize with. It’s hard for me to put myself in her shoes.
It is very difficult to not bash her and I’ve deleted scene after scene after scene where I have done just that. Usually when I have a final product with a scene she’s in, I’ve already deleted anywhere from 5 to 15 different approaches. Not that I outright write her as a terrible character, but when I reread it, you can practically taste the distaste I have and that’s not okay. You, the reader, should not be able to tell if I’m writing her right.
So in Stay Standing I have scenes where I succeeded and scenes where I did not and I feel like it left a certain message I did not intend to leave. Clearly, towards the end of the story, years in, where I’ve become a better writer, Ginny also becomes better as a consequence.
The most difficult part about Ginny, the character, is that I know a lot of my dislike comes from a certain level of animosity I carry from my own childhood. I had a hard time making friends so whenever I brought them over and my younger siblings wanted to take away the friend (the attention of that friend, I should correct) that I worked so hard for ,it always devastated me because THEY were brilliant at making friends and had them come over all the time, played with other kids all the time. But I did not and they still felt the need to take.
Now I understand more, I never viewed myself as the cool kid, never thought my siblings looked up to me. But they did. They thought I was brilliant. And they wanted to befriend their brilliant big sisters friend. It makes perfect sense NOW, but back then I didn’t understand.
Safe to say, reading about Ginny trying to get Harry’s attention right from the start in Chamber of Secrets, while I was in elementary made me hate her character very much. It was a harmless crush and perfectly normal. Obviously I know that now, but I still don’t like her. I still have this distaste that’s never faltered.
In the following books when she would befriend Hermione and Harry, it was more tolerable, but it still left a bitter taste in my mouth for her character. I found everything she did annoyed me. It was pretty innocent stuff, really, but it still bugged me that she seemed rather popular, well liked, beautiful, yet she still sought attention from her crush Harry Potter. It was a bit obsessive really and out of place because there were so few scenes where he saw her interact with Harry. It never really felt like she had a significant conversation with him. Her personality never really shined through. She was seen rarely and in those moments she never showed any care for her siblings. And perhaps that’s because the story is told through Harry’s perspective. We see her in some of the later books dancing with Fred and George and having fun, but that’s it.
Though I do understand Harry saving Ginny probably put a stamp on her adoration for him. It makes sense that the crush lasted so long. It also attributes in part to bad writing. As much as I adore the books, I’ll be the first to admit Rowling did not have a good grasp on the romantic aspects of things. And that’s coming from someone who is Ace. She did not have a good grasp on sibling relationships. The only sibling relationship I think she wrote quite well are the Creevy brothers, actually.
The lack of interaction between Ron, Fred and George. And more specifically, between Ron and Ginny, really bothered me.
That, more than anything, is what bugged me about Ginny’s friendship with Hermione and Harry, because there didn’t seem to be ANY relationship between Ron and Ginny. THAT bothered me.
There are lines in the book that suggested that Hermione and Ginny hung out. Lines in the book to show that Harry and Ginny were at least on good terms and talked on and off. BUT NOT LINES to show the same between Ginny and Ron.
It seemed like HARRY talked to the Weasley siblings more often and on a more positive note than Ron did.
This is due to Rowlings assumption that the reader just knows they hang out. In her interviews she makes comments that suggest how closely knit the Wealsey’s are. How fond the siblings are of Ron. She makes comments that of course everyone loves Ron because he’s Ron, how could you not? She’s built this world up in her head and she seems to believe that it should be obvious so she doesn’t bother to write scenes that show it because it just is. There is a clear distinction between how Rowling speaks of these characters and how she writes things down in the book. Which is a huge problem for the reader who is not privy to all that Rowling knows, only what she writes.
Getting back on track, my point here is that every time I try to write Ginny, every scene that she shows up in Stay Standing, it has been very difficult. I admit, at the beginning of the story, I failed the character a little bit. I still think she might have lost her temper and told Ron not to come for her birthday, that feels in character to me, but the bitterness and cruelty behind that scene? No, I didn’t mean that.
The birthday scene was meant to be a sort of blowing up of all the tension that seemed to manifest between them during Half Blood Prince. J.K Rowling wrote no reconciliation between the siblings. Only Ron and Hermione. We are left to assume there was one. Or that, somehow, the nod of Ron accepting Harry as Ginny’s girlfriend was some sort of make up.
Half Blood Prince has Ginny and Ron at each others throats and there simply is nothing to suggest they fixed things. They simply don’t talk much after that. And in Deathly Hallows, Ron demonstrates extreme concern for her, but Ginny is MORE concerned for Harry when they meet up again than seeing if her brother is okay. In fact, there’s not a single line to suggest that she had any concern for her big brother at all, which sickened me and pretty much reaffirmed my hatred for her character.
I despise bashing characters though and so I have tried very hard to write her in a positive light. To put myself in her position and try to see things from her perspective, but that is why she has literally only one scene in the entirety of Stay Standing, from her point of view, towards the end of the story.
The Mirror scene: “She’d thought that Harry and Hermione were a lot more damaged than Ron though.”
At this point, I’d sort of learned how my siblings viewed me. They had this... filter when it came to the things I said and did. They wanted to impress me, they wanted to be like me, they thought I was emotional impenetrable and that nothing they did could affect me in any way because I was just that strong.
So I sort of took that into consideration when I wrote from Ginny’s point of view, and I feel like I understood her better, like I could sort of see how SHE felt better than when I was younger.
“He was more put together than the other two were.”
I feel like the way she viewed Ron might have put him on this... not a pedestal, but I feel like Ginny saw Ron as someone who should know better, as someone who knew his family loved him. I think she saw his witty jokes and his many friends and the assured way he went about helping them and just thought he was a much more confidant person than he actually is. She saw him as her smart, witty, funny big brother who judged her even though she was trying her best.
I think she would have met hearing he left Harry and Hermione with anger at first before it would give way to confusion and hurt and disappointment.
“Ron abandoned them in the middle of their journey. He just fucking left, the coward.”
I think Ginny genuinely cares, but she’s spent so much time seeing her brothers a certain way, looking at them like obstacles she needs to overcome, that it would take something huge to shake her of that view point.
Molly’s expectations of her being the little girl warring with her need to be on equal footing with her brothers created the rather harsh and terrible things she did in Half Blood Prince. She’s overcompensating and her view on things are not how they actual are (just as it was for all of use growing up).
In a way, Ginny is the best way to measure my own growth, coming to understand her character (not really like, but understand) helped a lot in understanding my own siblings and realizing the problem I had with her character helped me to recognize flaws in my own judgement.
I rewrote the mirror scene probably twenty times and that’s an understatement. I did a lot of working through my own feelings in this one.
“Oh God, why was her Big Brother dying? And she felt so bipolar because just an hour ago she was filled with so much hatred for him.”
Ginny’s growth here, all the realizations, must of been like an atomic bomb going off inside of her heart and having to regrow it cell by cell. I really just obliterated her in this scene.
This writers cut will probably be the hardest to write for obvious reasons. I know a lot of readers must have been scratching their heads wondering why Ginny sometimes seemed so harsh and other times towards the end so loving.
I tried to stay true to the character, but with Ginny I always feel like I’m out of my depth and I know I’ve failed in some areas. Every time I tried to write her more... fierce side, it turned my more cruel than I intended. I couldn’t write her fierce without remembering all the shitty stuff she pulled and that in turn made it hard not to write her in anger. So then I tried to avoid writing her fierce and she just read so meek. Then I would try again and it would be this odd mix of too mean, too meek, too all over the place and I’d sit there going Yikes, this isn’t right at all.
So I hope this answers questions without angering any Ginny fans. Like I said, my distaste for her character stems from personal feelings and I’ve tried over the course of the years to be better about it, but I don’t ever really think I will enjoy writing Ginny even if I manage to keep true to her character.
But I feel like I understand her a lot better than I once did and moving forward I plan to work on writing her properly.
