Fiction?

When Bryan and I first started dating, he told me I reminded him of Robert Heinlein’s heroines. I hadn’t read any of those sci-fi novels at the time, but I remember mentioning as much to my dad in those early days. He gave me a deadpan look and then cursed. He had read those books and knew exactly what Bryan meant. It wasn’t until a few years later that I understood having finally read Stranger in a Strange Land and Friday.

Passionate, confident, attractive, smart, loving, comfortable with sex and words and being–these are the hallmarks of a Heinlein heroine. Do I mind the comparison? Nope. Not one bit. Do I suffer from imposter syndrome like everybody? Eeyup. I’m also scared, insecure, occasionally anxious, approval-seeking, people-pleasing, and, to my mother’s never-ending chagrin, I have been known to curse-like-a-sailor-on-a-blue-streak. 😛 It is possible to hold many worlds inside of ourselves at once.

As I’ve been writing this blog for the past six months, I’ve been thinking about writing fiction. I want to build a world with rich characters that generate sympathy and antipathy from the reader. Chatting with friends recently over dinner, I remarked how the most interesting characters in literature are complex (like most things in life, eh?) No on-off switch, no good-bad paradigm, but possessing ambiguities and a multitude of characteristics, shades of gray (not that kind of shades of gray–I don’t want to write that sort of story…yet.)

What is consistent in literature and life is that we feel like the main characters of our own stories. We should. This gives us tremendous potential and considerable responsibility.