by Helen Jacey
This is a generalization, of course. As the gender gap closes, and culture gives men and women more freedom to live how we want, our stories, and what we like to think of as unchanging mythic patterns, can and actually do change! Increasingly, heroines’ stories deal not with the “happy ever after” but with “what happens next?” And heroes? Maybe now they are finding the soft maiden and overburdened mother within themselves.
The ongoing existence of stereotypes is evidence of centuries-long strictly defined masculine and feminine roles. The flipside of soft heroines is the range of negative stereotypes of women — the nag, hag, evil stepmother, ugly sister, evil witch, vulturistic seductress — and their film and TV manifestations — femme fatale, bunny boiler, MILF, black widow, raving nympho, axe-wielding lesbian, welfare queen, difficult diva, and blonde bimbo. Negative stereotypes reveal misogyny about women. On the whole they don’t resonate truthfully with women, but we still take them to heart. But the trouble with the ongoing existence of any stereotype is that it sets up parameters in your mind, like a keep-out fence. If your heroine is too wounded or complex, she might share some traits that we are used to seeing in a stereotypical character. She’s entered the forbidden zone of our unconscious, and we fear everyone will hate her.
THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Producers and development executives, both male and female, might project their own experiences of women as well as their feelings about what women should be like onto the female character. They might genuinely believe the best chance of commercial success is to have a strongly likeable and sympathetic heroine. You might find concerns can be raised about:
A heroine’s selfishness.
A heroine’s emotional wounds affecting her ability to be warm and open.
A heroine being too sexually aggressive or too radical in her expressions of desire.
A heroine’s age or attractiveness.
A heroine’s lack of conventional femininity
There’s no easy answer to these expectations. You have to manage the process and trust your convictions.
How to Handle Heroine Softening
If people you work with, co-writers, producers, or directors have ideas about the heroine that veer wildly from your vision, then the two Cs — clarity and compromise — now have to become your modus operandi.
Clarity
You need to define exactly what isn’t working. Prepare to be politely challenging. If comments are vague, it’s your job to tease out exactly what isn’t working and why. If you don’t, you risk seriously misfiring with the next draft.
A writer told me that a producer said to her “I don’t fancy her” about the heroine, as if that was an important criteria of characterization! It certainly might improve the potential movie’s prospects for satisfying the male audience! If something similar happens to you, you have the interesting task as writer to find out what kind of women he does fancy and what puts him off. If his vision of women is for softness and vulnerability, then you will have to use the M-Factor argument. Cite all those heroines who stand out because they weren’t soft and vulnerable, or because they dealt with rarely seen situations for women. The ones that did big box office are usually the most sensible to cite — Scarlett O’ Hara, Juno, Dora in Central Station, Thelma and Louise, Ripley, Donna in Mamma Mia!, Margaret in The Proposal, or Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or choose heroines that you personally like and why.
Remind your team that if she is too soft your heroine (and the film) could risk being unforgettable. Suggest that the only hope for the film being memorable would be to give the soft and uncomplicated heroine a very dramatic story. From Precious to Fiona in Shrek, heroines can be truly likeable, kind, and loving, but to be memorable they have to have a dire problem!
Take Changeling. A perfect mother, saintly and beautiful, suffers the most unimaginable series of horrors: Her son disappears from home while she is at work, and then the police insist another boy is her missing child. Christine Collins’ outrage and desperate denial leads to the police incarcerating her in a psychiatric asylum. This leads to the second half of the story being led by male heroes, a priest and a detective who ultimately save the heroine from injustice. This is the trouble with true stories. If your true life character had no real power or autonomy over her life, at least by sticking with her POV gives her a chance of memorability rather than the story or another character leading the action.
Changeling is a good example of heavy viewing. The layers of Conflict are very dominant, and internal Conflict is limited. There are a few layers of union, except some female bonding in the institution and compassion from other characters for the heroine. The role choice of Victim is dominant, until Christine reflects the Amazon role choice when she defends the other female patients. What could be worse than losing your son after you had not been very pleasant that morning? What if she’d snapped at him? The heroine is not memorable, but her harrowing situation is. It is a horrible event, and a story worth telling, but the main character suffers from a loss of complexity by being the perfect mom.
Compromise
If you can’t compromise, screenwriting might be an unsatisfying profession for you. Your role as writer is to play your vital role in creating a screenplay that you, the director, and the producers consider to be good enough to find a wide audience. It’s about taking notes, listening to feedback, and remaining open. Nine times out of ten, if many people raise the same concerns about your story, they might just have a point.
The art of compromise involves a genuine willingness to listen, but too much compromise can kill genuine art. Your voice, choices, and judgments as the screenwriter are essential components to the finished art form. You aren’t just providing a blueprint, no matter who calls the script that! A theme is not something that comes to life on set; it is born on the page. Remember, some people you work with might not even share your understanding of what a theme is, but they will feel the power of your story if you have managed to retain your creative vision. Screenwriting is a particularly challenging form of creative writing. It’s an art, a craft, and a science. If you feel strongly enough about any character, principle, or dramatic element, stick to your guns.
MANAGING YOUR CAREER
Although this book is really about your heroine, I just wanted to share with you some final thoughts about developing your career in order to help you become a memorable writer.
For the Nurturers Out There
If you are a Nurturer of others, finding physical and mental space is a priority for your creative and career success. Some lucky people have the amazing ability to just switch off whatever domestic hurly-burly is going on around them and find the right mental focus. They don’t let the needs and demands of other get to them.
Women often find it harder to switch off their need to look after others. Sometimes they don’t even want to give up or share this role. Whether this is a biological brain-wiring problem, the effect of estrogen, or is a product of being brought up to care for others, the result can be the same. Nurturing others can limit your output.
As men have sought to become more equal and active partners on the parenting front, and as more women have shared the role, they too feel that finding time for creativity is an issue. I talk to a great deal of parents in my seminars about this, and I am a writer mom and step-mom, so I know what a constant dilemma finding a balance is.
Life might feed inspiration but at some point the inspiration has to be translated into a developed project. Life can also kill inspiration if it’s too frenetic or demanding. Exhaustion doesn’t help art, neither does a fragmented mind. You need to find isolation, and your project needs incubation. What you focus on grows, simple as that.
Working in blocks of time might help you. One writer I know does what she can around her busy schedule, but in the early stages she never feels submerged enough. Then periodically she goes away for a week for complete isolation. During this time she can pull everything together. The themes, stories,
and characters start to click. The art takes form. She goes back to busy life feeling much more in control and with a real sense of progress. As her project develops and gains strength, she finds it easier to feel in control even when she’s working from home and doing her day job. There are other ways to get the necessary isolation if you don’t like the idea of going away. The novelist Fay Weldon burnt the “early morning oil” to get a great deal of writing done before her children woke up. Remember — your memorable heroine is worth it!
FUTURE HEROINES
As we finish, let’s anticipate the future and the kinds of stories heroines will be leading Wouldn’t it be great if your next heroine is one of those truly unforgettable female characters who are remembered for decades? Clever writers can dream up characters that somehow represent exactly what the audience almost needs to see and hear, sum up the zeitgeist, and ring true, even in a sci-fi film. So ask yourself
What kind of films would you like to see with a woman in the lead?
What have you never seen a heroine do or be?
What stories are yet to be told?
What changes do you anticipate in women’s lives over the next decade?
As women’s lives have been and remain in flux, it makes sense to look at all the changes, wherever you are in the world. Women’s lives always go forward, as the evolutions in movies and TV shows reflect. Take the vampire movies Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse. Their prime audience is young and female. The characterization of the heroine Bella, and the focus of her story on unconditional and eternal love, obviously communicates something very powerful to the teenage girls who are fans of these movies. Bella has a dark and all-conquering passion for her vampire lover Edward; she is heroically protective of him and will go as far as sacrificing her mortality for him. Bella and Edward’s love represents the ultimate union of soul mates. Teenage girls’ capacity to idolize and obsess about men reflects a yearning for intimacy and togetherness that boys of the same age tend not to experience as strongly. But Bella’s characterization also reflects strength, autonomy, and empowerment — qualities that teenage girls want to relate to. She’s no passive heroine waiting to be saved. Bella is deep and not conventionally “girlie.” She hates shopping and fashion, mumbles when she speaks, and even bonds with guys more easily than she does with girls. She’s memorable because she’s an individual who resonates truthfully.
Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, Calendar Girls, Damages, Mamma Mia!, and Ladies in Lavender reflect different aspects about women getting older and their feelings about their bodies, sexuality, and relationships. Although Feel Good Femininity, these stories are a long way from the acceptable clichés of The Golden Girls and Miss Marple. The older female audience is only getting bigger, and women everywhere may well want to be fulfilled and entertained by stories that respect they have sex drives, are menopausal, are still attractive to the right men, and want to be a grandmother. They also might want to see more Jane Tennisons and older Ripleys who take on complex quests and missions — women who are clever strategists, brilliant thinkers, champions of causes, intrepid explorers, and risk-taking decision makers. I predict a rise in stories with older heroines or else the thirty-five-plus female audience will remain untapped.
And back on the family front? What about the growing number of forty-something moms who will have teenagers in their sixties, those women who chose never have had children (and for whom this isn’t a soul-destroying tragedy), and the rise of stepmoms? Who will tell these women’s stories? Maybe it will be you!
Then there’s your own culture, wherever in the world you are. What kinds of success stories for heroines have emerged? What are the conditions like for women screenwriters in your industries? It’s interesting to watch movies from different cultures. You can get a good idea of what I call “zeitgeist” issues going on for women in a particular country. Take French cinema as an example. Villa Amalia, The Piano Teacher, Leaving, and I’ve Loved You So Long show painfully honest experiences of love and loss. The French have made an iconic art form out of internal Conflict in women and are not afraid of giving audiences heroines who question their lives and make exceptionally difficult choices. For a nation that gave their female citizens the vote decades after the U.S. and the U.K., their storytelling has definitely made up for lost time! French heroines seem to be angry and are not afraid to show it.
As climate change threatens our very existence, terrorism remains a constant threat, and the global economy battles its worst-ever depression, maybe we all want more escapism in the form of fantasy, fun, and feel good movies. Or maybe the pendulum will swing to a preference for films and TV series that inform and reflect our questioning values. But there’s a good chance the female audience in particular will continue to want heroines’ stories that reflect the continued flux in their lives and push boundaries in the storytelling. If the male audience is discovering a need for more emotionally expressive stories, as the rise of the bromance and bromedy testify, then there’s a good chance an opposite shift can happen for the female audience with films like a female version of The Departed, in which typical feminine roles take backseat. As heroes become more relationship orientated, will heroines of all ages take on more action? Will the gender gap close in our stories, so that heroes and heroines can be truly interchangeable in leading strong stories? Maybe unhelpful expectations and outmoded sex roles will finally disappear altogether, and we will all focus on our communal strengths in protecting the planet and living in peace.
I sincerely wish your memorable heroine is someone who shows the way.
EXERCISE: SCREENWRITER’S STORY QUESTIONNAIRE
Imagine you are in charge of a committee for the protection of memorable heroines. Ask yourself
How are you going to make sure people understand what your heroine stands for? Write your very own Memorable Heroine’s Manifesto!
How do you find time for yourself and your writing? What could you do differently to increase your satisfaction with your work, and your output?
Finally, complete the Screenwriter’s Story Questionnaire, the last in this book.
Good luck!
SCREENWRITER’S STORY QUESTIONNAIRE
1. What is your heroine’s name?
2. What is her M-Factor?
3. What is her dominant story type?
4. What is the theme of your story?
5. What is the Metaphoric Wound?
6. What role choices does your heroine particularly identify with and how?
7. What Phases resonate with your story structure?
8. What are the greatest sources of Conflict for your heroine?
9. What are the greatest sources of union for your heroine?
10. What genre have you chosen?
11. Who is the perfect actress to play your heroine?
12. What is the title of your story?
A HEROINE IN ACTION:
AN ANALYSIS OF JUNO
Chapter 10
Juno was written by Diablo Cody who went on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay. As a sixteen-year-old who goes on a quest to find the right adoptive parents for her unborn child, Juno immediately resonated with all types of audiences all over the world. Why did she hold such appeal? What was the secret to Juno that made this low-budget movie with a relatively unknown cast such a big hit?
By relating the principles of The Woman in the Story to Juno’s story, we can see how they could be used to create a truly memorable heroine like Juno.
JUNO’S SUPERTHEME
Juno is definitely not a Familiar Femininity film. There is nothing conservative about the story, which subverts a great deal of prejudice about pregnant sixteen-year-olds. But it hasn’t got a Fighting Femininity Supertheme either, because Juno isn’t fighting the system. She doesn’t feel that life is unfair. Like many teenage girls, Juno was born long after feminism, and she’s not unduly concerned with “equality.” Her dad and stepmom Bren raise her, and her real mother lives far away with a ne
w batch of kids. Juno has no meaningful contact with her, except sending her the annual gift of a cactus. Neither has Juno got a Feel Good Femininity Supertheme because Juno is not about celebrating Juno’s femininity as a young, pregnant teenager.
Juno doesn’t deal with her abortion dilemma with a feminist perspective. She does simply what many teenagers do, gets carried away by her sexual urges and has unprotected sex with Paulie Bleeker. Now she’s paying the price of that risk; she takes full responsibility for her situation, even pushing Paulie away because her identity is in turmoil. She takes it for granted she can get an abortion, and she makes up her own mind that it just doesn’t feel right. The male characters love and nurture her. If Juno has a problem with either gender, it is probably with women, but she doesn’t think consciously in these terms. That’s up to the audience to work out.
Juno is a Future Femininity Film. Juno happens to be female, happens to get pregnant, and takes herself on a quest to do something about it.
JUNO’S M-FACTOR
Juno’s most compulsive need is defensiveness. This means she pushes people away to protect herself. Being emotionally open is not her style. It could leave her open to rejection. Juno’s most irreverent trait is defiance. She won’t be told what to do, even when it’s in her best interests. She will do what she wants, when she wants. Finally, Juno’s most charismatic trait is her verbal dexterity of wit. Now, do the simple equation! Juno’s M-Factor is naïve tough-talker. Juno thinks she knows it all, spouts defensive back-chat, and learns the hard way that she might have got things wrong.