The Woman in the Story

by Helen Jacey

  The audience will make immediate assessments about your heroine based on the information you give about her. It’s a human need to “place” a person as quickly as possible, so we can start to relate to them. We root out recognizable factors in characters, so we can test our worldview and our own experience against them. Even when we watch a world movie, from an entirely different culture, we look out for themes, characters, and stories that might bear out or validate our own understanding.

  As with all characters, your audience will try to “place” the heroine as soon as it can. Each member of the audience will relate your heroine to their own external and internal experiences and expectations of what women are or should be like. By external, I mean the women they have met and related to in their own lives. By internal I mean the idealized image or negative projections we all carry around about women, which emerge out of our deep unconscious. The most ready-made way of helping the audience connect to the character is to use stereotypes, the most two-dimensional and clichéd form of characterization. Stereotypes and stereotypical behavior can and do have some limited uses, particularly in comedies, but as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, this is the exception rather than the rule.

  In developing your heroine’s character, there’s a great way of making sure you avoid stereotypes and make her unique, while recognizing that a woman in the story usually triggers some pretty powerful unconscious feelings in the audience. This is done by developing and using your heroine’s role choices.

  A role choice is your heroine’s conscious and unconscious relationship to cultural expectations of women’s roles.

  A role choice affects your heroine’s internal and external sense of identity. A good way of thinking about role choices is to relate them to stages we go through in life, when we identify with certain ways of being. It’s when people say things like, “that was when I was into being a domestic goddess” or “that’s the time when nothing was going to stop me,” or “that’s when I was trying to be a better mother than my own mom.” It’s the “when I was being…” bit of the statement that reflects what a role choice is and how your heroine will think about it.

  As you get to know each role choice, imagine your heroine is very old, looking back over the course of her life. How would she remember these roles she took on?

  ACCEPTABLE CLICHÉS AND STEREOTYPES

  Thinking about your heroine’s role choices will help you make a better judgment call regarding what is a recognizable and truthful aspect to her individual character and what can be a cliché. When it comes to writing women characters, we risk colluding with clichés. It can be really hard to know what is cliché and what is true to life. For screenwriters, cliché is the most dreaded form of bad writing, so why aren’t we more alert to these acceptable clichés? I do it myself, so I know what I’m talking about.

  The most obvious acceptable clichéd characters include good and happy mothers who never lose it with their kids, the fashionista who has to learn deeper values, the neurotic woman who has to be tamed through the love of a man, the nice girl next door, the mean girl, the career woman who learns to put others first, the supportive wife (not that wives can’t be supportive but when you only see this dimension of a female character it’s a cliché) and the nagging wife (vice versa), and the downtrodden victim. Do not forget all those simplistic women in adverts thinking they are worth it or who have discovered the best detergent. I often find it amusing that you can be watching great female characters on TV, like those in The Wire, Weeds, and Damages when the commercial break is stuffed with stereotypes.

  Some acceptable clichés are even used as an argument to show how far women have come when the cliché proves the opposite! When people claim strippers and prostitutes are empowered women in control of their lives they are spouting an acceptable cliché: to justify men’s sexual need for the “oldest profession” and women’s non-sexual need (usually money) to collude by selling their bodies. There simply can’t be one stripper or prostitute who hasn’t at some point had to face, at least to some degree, a sense of self-betrayal in doing her job. When a prostitute says she loves her job and is in control, I have one thing to say: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” I know we’ve come a long way from the “tart with a heart” stereotype, and many representations of prostitutes and strippers are more dimensional, but we don’t often see the prostitute’s normal life or real motivations, such as low self-esteem, beyond a gratuitous or titillating outer shell.

  Acceptable clichés in story action can include the heroine needing a man to sort her problem out; the ugly duckling finally realizing that she can be a beautiful woman if she makes an effort and loving the newfound attention; the girls’ night out in which the wild spirit of women is unleashed; the wedding dress shopping session; and the woman being angry because she’s been let down by her useless man — again!

  There are several factors behind the enduring existence of the “acceptable cliché.” First, traditional notions of what women should and shouldn’t be affect all women’s lives. We reject these notions, uncomfortably collude with them, or see them as normal. It can be hard to distinguish between acceptable cliché and what we really believe women can relate to. Secondly, there’s the tricky business of writing a heroine and pleasing the many people you write for. Everyone in the creative process of developing a heroine is going to be concerned about her audience appeal. I’m going to talk more about this in Chapter 9, “Unsung Heroines.”

  Role choices are there to help you think beyond the acceptable clichés. They are drawn from roles that most cultures, including the “postfeminist” West, associate with women and that women assume. The main aim of the role choice is to help you work out how your heroine, as an individual, relates to each role choice. The more you enter your heroine’s mind, the more you will understand her individual choices and actions. A role choice isn’t a job or actual vocation. Your heroine’s attitude to certain role choices may result in her choosing certain kinds of jobs (or being stuck with no option but to do a certain kind of job), but a role choice is much broader. It’s about her whole identity and self-perception as a woman.

  By using role choices creatively you can illuminate your character’s individuality and the specific nature of the culture she lives within.

  Beyond Archetypes

  As you will soon see, using role choices to help develop character is quite different than using the Jungian archetypes. Archetypes are based on the principle that certain recognizable roles are a result of human existence and emerge out of a collective unconscious. They are seen as masks that we wear, and which are interchangeable. A role choice says, “Wait a minute, this role is culturally created!” The usual definitions of archetypes don’t help you question the cultural expectations around the roles your heroine chooses. A stereotype and archetype can only go so far. A role choice asks you to define your character’s choices and the reasons for them. The whole point of a role choice is to help you question the notion of “types.” If someone says your heroine is a “maternal type,” it could mean that you have emphasized in her character an over-identification with the nurturing role choice.

  HOW TO USE ROLE CHOICES

  A role choice can help you to question and explore your heroine’s attitudes toward her world. In this respect, you can use a role choice to question certain expectations about women and how they play out in your story. Using role choices creatively can help you define your heroine’s internal and external identity as a girl or a woman. How your heroine relates to each role choice is a way you can deepen your characterization and your story. They can make you question your own feelings and views about why women make certain role choices.

  It is most likely that as the story develops, so will your heroine’s role choices. She might strongly identify with certain role choices at the start of her story that she will gradually grow out of She might start identifying with another. The role choice can last the whole story long or be momentary visible in a
scene or two. Your heroine can identify with any role choice at any given moment.

  You might decide that certain role choices will only be evident in other female characters in order to serve as a reminder of what your heroine could be if conditions or her attitudes change or not. Seeing it in other women, for example, might make her reject that particular role choice because it’s the last thing she wants to be identified with. Or another character will make a certain role choice and be a good example for the heroine.

  Remember, role choices are a creative approach to support your writing choices. So treat them flexibly. There’s no right or wrong.

  The five groups of role choices in a heroine’s story are:

  Heroine

  Nurturer

  Dependant

  Believer

  Caryatid

  Each group of role choices have many varieties within each one, which you will get to know

  A Question of Age?

  If it helps you, you can see the role choices as reflections of common stages of women’s lives. For instance, you could see the Dependant as reflecting childhood and adolescence, the Believer as reflecting the idealism of young adults, the Nurturer as reflecting the childbearing years of women who become mothers and wives, and the Caryatid as a reflection of older women’s lives when they have more freedom from family commitments. Using the role choices like this doesn’t really do justice to their character-building potential. They are really based on the principle that what is a relevant choice to one woman’s life isn’t going to be the same for another. Age in years doesn’t necessarily mean maturity of mind.

  As you will find out, role choices frequently subvert our expectations, depending on the personality of the heroine making the choice. They support uniqueness and memorability. Now let’s meet each one.

  THE ROLE CHOICE OF HEROINE

  The heroine role choice is very simple. It represents your main female character seeking or reacting to a certain kind of life to be true to herself. Think about it, aren’t we all on a mission to make sense of our lives the best way we can? Well, your heroine is doing exactly that. In your story, you are going to narrow down a period of her life and make the “seeking” and “reacting” very specific to her and the situation she is in. To be a heroine of her own life motivates every female character in your story.

  Your heroine might hate her life and want change, fall into change by accident, or want to protect the status quo. She might need to recover from pain or past trauma, so that she can move on and heal the scars. She might be frozen and spend the whole story thawing. She might want to go on an amazing quest, pursue a career, solve a riddle, or seek vengeance or justice. She might want to be extremely bad. The heroine role choice is behind all of these drives and far more. Heroine is the role choice behind every woman in the story. What kind of heroine role choices your heroine identifies with at any given moment will definitely evolve. The main different kinds of heroine are the Outsider Heroine, Incomplete Heroine, Survivor Heroine, and Questing Heroine.

  Outsider Heroines

  These can be misfits, rebels, lesbians, disabled women, older women, sick women, or addicted women. Their dominant drive is to seek life on their own terms in spite of external expectations. It’s not high on these heroines’ agendas to belong to society, or sometimes they have no choice in the matter if they are outcasts or just can’t belong. Some Outsider Heroines have taken one look at the status quo and realized it’s not for them. They don’t want to belong; they are motivated to reject it, particularly if society labels them as somehow redundant or undesirable, like the three middle-aged heroines in Heading South, who seek sun and sex with younger men in Haiti. These women are unconventional and defiant. An Outsider Heroine is like a reverse fish-out-of-water. She jumped out of the water a long time ago and found she adapted quite well, thank you very much. It’s going back in that scares her. Cheri shows a group of high-class Parisian prostitutes using their considerable wealth to ape the high-society lifestyle that excludes them. A heroine might hate the judgments society makes about her through no fault of her own. Sometimes, the heroine becomes an Outsider Heroine because she finally realizes she doesn’t belong anymore, try as she might. She might be too old, too plain, too fat, just like the fat little sister Anais in A Ma Soeur!. She is never going to belong or be good enough, so why fight it?

  Sometimes she might be too poor, too ethnically different as in She, a Chinese, a film in which the heroine struggles to belong to her own and a new culture. Frozen River and Precious both have Outsider Heroines who are also excluded by their extreme poverty and lack of opportunity. Sometimes a heroine is an Outsider for something as simple as being a “woman returner,” a woman who is going back to work after years of child rearing, plagued by lack of confidence. Sometimes she’s an Outsider because someone’s forced her there. Kitty in The Painted Veil is a bourgeois and shallow woman who is dragged by her husband to a cholera-infested Chinese rural community as a punishment for infidelity. In her isolation she learns some important lessons about herself and love in the process.

  Outsider Heroines don’t often reintegrate into mainstream life. It can be the last thing they want anyway. But they might dip their toe into the pool of convention, just to see what they aren’t missing, or so they can validate their lifestyle choices. Sometimes their outsider existence is interrupted by someone needing something from them, and they feel a moral compunction to change their ways. Dora in Central Station is one of these.

  Every woman has something of the Outsider in her. This is the result of equality for women arriving relatively recently. Even today,

  many high-achieving women feel they suffer “imposter” syndrome in their jobs, even when they are successful. Even young women, who weren’t born in the throes of feminism, can feel this so there must be something about being born female that still casts the outsider shadow, however faint. The woman who breastfeeds her baby in public and is asked to go to the ladies room is momentarily an Outsider Heroine. By doing the most natural thing in the world, she can fall outside expectations.

  Survivor Heroines

  Victims, betrayed women, entrapped women, abused women, and ex-addicted women are found in this category. Their dominant drive is to seek life. Sometimes life has dealt extra painful blows to a woman. She’s been harshly knocked off center and needs to find her balance.

  Needing to achieve closure on the past wound can be a very powerful drive in a Survivor Heroine. In I’ve Loved You So Long, Juliette needs to come to terms with her decision to end the life of her six-year-old son. Although she is also an Outsider Heroine because of her long prison incarceration, her driving need is to mourn the loss of her little boy, forgive herself, and move on. Loss and bereavement are common to Survivor Heroines, such as Holly in P.S. I Love You, Hannah in The English Patient, and Manuela in All About My Mother whose stories focus on their process of healing the deepest pain.

  The scars of romantic love are very common in Survivor Heroines. Infidelity, cruel rejection, being forced to give up one’s true love, and the opposite, the arranged marriage, are all frequent motivations for the heroine to recover from the past and seek a new life.

  Survivor Heroines’ stories tend to have powerful arcs in which a heroine starts in one state and ends the narrative in a much better place, at least mentally. Sometimes there is no way of surviving a brutal regime that is designed to crush its heroines. The Circle and the Curse of the Golden Flower, both Fighting Femininity films, have heroines who end up mentally or physically annihilated. Sometimes a heroine seeks life in the face of death. My Life Without Me, Frida, and Sylvia all follow heroines with a tenuous grip on life. Survival for these heroines means keeping it together in spite of the threat of death.

  None of us go through life protected from loss, pain, or injury. The process of recovery from loss includes denial, despair, numbness, guilt, and anger. Surviving Heroines experience all these emotions and more. With these heroines you can fray your a
udience’s nerves and redden their eyes. Precious takes us on a rollercoaster ride in which her path to autonomy from a position of complete victimization is harrowing yet ultimately transcendental.

  Incomplete Heroines

  Rejected women, women yearning for love, women who do not feel emotionally whole, women with mental health problems, and women who love too much are all Incomplete Heroines. The dominant drive of this role choice is to seek emotional fulfilment.

  Most romantic heroines fall into this category. These are women who seek balance in their relationships and need to work on their issues to heal their relationship problems. Historical heroines such as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Ida in Cold Mountain, to very contemporary heroines like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City and Amanda and Iris in The Holiday embark on very emotional and internal journeys to make sense of their relationships. They need to heal internal wounds that are getting in the way of either their own personal autonomy or their ability to find love.

  The love interest of an Incomplete Heroine is usually her best healer and teacher, but sometimes they can represent her deepest pain. I explain the reciprocal nature of love relationships in Chapter 7, “Making Love and Feeling Good,” but it’s important to emphasize the role of The Other person in an Incomplete Heroine’s life. If there are problems in her relationships, it’s usually down to an unresolved problem or an internal wound that is crying out to be healed. The relationship either needs to end or grow. The Incomplete Heroine has to face up to the fact that although life may have dealt her some blows, until she takes responsibility for her pain, she will not recover. Kym in Rachel Getting Married leaves rehab pretending that she’s dealt with her drug addiction. It emerges that not only is she lying about her progress to everyone, but also she’s lying to herself. Her deepest pain is the fact that her drug taking led to her little brother’s death when he was in her care. Completeness can only be gained for Kym by going back into rehab and truly facing herself and owning her responsibility.