Building a heroine
Lovely, ain't she? That's my sister. (The one on the left. The other one is her stage-sister. Like a Coraline critter, yes.)
Even before I started writing a single word for the Codemancer novel, I knew I wanted a heroine rather than a hero. But then I caught myself wondering: what would she be like? Mass media has popularized the idea of svelte, skinny people who are somehow disarmingly strong or competent. (Which is not to say they can't be, but sometimes it's just silly. Post-apocalyptic heroines cannot afford to be delicate. They have armies to lead, damn it.) The Atlantic's Julianne Ross sums it up here, really:
In Mortal Instruments, for example, Clary Frayis “delicate” and “slender,” with a small chest and “narrow hips.” Lena Duchannes, the most powerful “caster” (i.e., witch) in the Beautiful Creatures series, earned her nickname “Lena Beana” because her grandmother thought she was “skinny as a string bean.” We learn that the tenacious heroine of Blood Red Road (a best-selling “Mad Max for girls”) is “scrawny” before we even learn her name. And, of course, there’s The Hunger Games, which makes it clear that Katniss Everdeen is “smaller naturally,” even in comparison with the other members of her starving district. Some readers became so attached to the image of a short, emaciated girl claiming victory in the battle-royal arena that when Jennifer Lawrence was cast as Katniss, multiple critics complained that she was too “big-boned” for the part.
Needless to say, I didn't want another cat-hipped sylph introduced to the literary mix. I also didn't want to feature a very large girl, although that had nothing to do with pop-culture ideals and everything to do with what I personally had in mind: someone average. I wanted someone who was in between both extremes. I wanted someone who was athletic but not built exclusively out of sculpted muscles. I wanted someone with a softness to their faces and a cord of flesh around their waist, who could be strong and identifiable all at the same time.
Which is how I ended up drawing inspiration from my little sister. She's about five feet tall and she climbs up silk ropes attached to ceilings for fun. She does parkour, teaches people yoga, and still pigs out on chocolate. She's your every girl who went ahead and decided to make a career out of physical activity but could have just as easily went into something more cerebral. She looks like how I imagine our protagonist would look like in ten years, if she eventually came to make the same decisions that my sister did.
The other reason as to why my sister became a basis for the character is, I guess, this article from video game luminary Jenn Frank entitled Allow Natural Death. which is gorgeous and heart-breaking and the kind of writing that will stick with you forever. In it, she talks about Super Hexagon, her adoptive mother’s last days, and humanity’s complex relationship with death. And love letters that have nothing to do with romance, and everything with the raw, beating emotion that gives reason to our daily lives.
I often tell freelancers that every article they write should be a love letter to just one person: they ought to picture that person, maybe pine a little for her or his love, as they write directly to that person. The Creatures column, I’d written directly to my mother.
In many ways, The Missing Familiars is a love letter to my sister, a telegram to the girl she used to be. When she was the same age as the main character, she began dieting feverishly in a bid to look like everyone else. More than a decade later, she confessed that that was the year when her eating disorders began. We joke that it’s the reason that she is so darn short but the knowledge eats at me constantly. I was a confused teenager at the time. I wish I knew enough to have stopped her, to have helped her make the right choices there and then. But I didn’t and I can't change that.
I can, however, determine what the heroine of The Missing Familiars will be like and the kind of values that she might end up sharing with tweens who find themselves with a copy of the book. I can help draw the line and say, "You don't need to be a Victoria's Secret model to be most excellent at life." I can mix up the best parts of my only sibling with a dash of Codemancy, a handful of cautionary parables, and a string of poignant flaws before putting the results out in the world.
Because that's what making something means, isn't it? The ability to shape worlds, to create characters that fall outside of the status quo, and talk about important ideas. If I can't decide that she won't be just another Katniss Everdeen, I might as well go write another Twilight trilogy instead.
With Petrina, the star of The Missing Familiars, I want to show that the role of "hero" is not exclusive to men or petite waifs. It belongs to anyone, really. Of any shape or size. I mean, Petrina is far from little Miss Perfect. She has troubles with peer pressure, and problems distinguishing her desires from her need to fit in with the crowd. She is feisty and headstrong and self-centered in the way only teenagers can be. She treats her familiar abysmally. (What's a familiar and the heck is this Codemancy thing I keep talking about? Well, funny you should ask that...)
But she is also youth's unassailable certainty that life is everything you make of it and hope and unmolded clay that might one day be forged into something wonderful. She is strong but not sure, a little bit of faith and hormonal anxiety, and a total gelato addict. I can't change what my sister has gone through in life, but I can take everything that she has learned to make a character that might, just maybe, help someone figure out the same questions my sister had at that age.