Love Triangle

There are very few things that immediately ruin a good book for me. One of them is love triangles.

Edward, Jacob and Bella. Peeta, Gale and Katniss. Maxon, Aspen and America. This trope is used with such frequency it makes me want to pull my hair out. It’s apparently the easiest way to show inner turmoil, to create waves and put bumps in the road of the heroine. But I hate it, and I am going to tell you why, because writing about the things that make me angry is my form of therapy.

Let’s get one thing straight, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility are not examples of a love triangle by the same definition I am going by (and if I read one more blog post or article saying that Austen was the master of the love triangle I am going to break something heavy and valuable). Wickham-Lizzie-Darcy- not a love triangle. Lizzie liked Whickham while she hated Darcy, and it wasn’t until Lizzie learned what an utter douchebag Wickham was that she sees Darcy for who he is and falls in love with him. There is never confusion expressed in Lizzie’s mind over which man to accept, and only one ever proposed! This is not a love triangle, it is a pair of non-intersecting lines. It is a young woman learning that the outward expression of personality does not dictate the inner character of a good man. Darcy may have loved her the whole time (I heartily believe that he did) but he does not express that to her until late in the novel, at the same time that she discovers Wickham’s true character, and Lizzie does not reciprocate Darcy’s affection until later.

I am talking about the kind of love triangle used in Twilight, where Bella is actively pursued by two men at the same time and she actively leading on both men, until she is able to make up her mind. She uses Jacob to make Edward jealous, and both men know this. In later books the two men are not shy about the fact that they are both romantically linked to Bella and make their aggression towards one another well known. They actively fight for Bella’s affections, while Bella hems and haws and can’t make up her mind and this is somehow meant to be romantic.

There are several reasons that I think this trope needs to die a painful and ungraceful death, ranging from the fact that it is an indication of lazy writing, to the fact that it is downright sexist.

1). It never changes. Pretty girl who doesn’t realize she is pretty is desired by both the long time friend or home grown, local boy and a deeply mysterious stranger or dark and moody bad boy. The girl is overwhelmed by the process of being wanted by one boy, much less two and she could not possibly make up her mind which one she likes more. So she lies. She lies to both of them, she lies to herself, and to everyone around them. And instead of calling off the half baked relationships, she attempts to carry on with both at the same time and everyone ends up angry and hurt. And somehow, her lies, her indecision, and her inability to see her own beauty (and therefore experiences shock that two men would ever look twice at her) somehow makes her desirable. Or at least that is how the author portrays her desirability.

There is little or no variation in how this plot plays out in novels across the YA landscape. You can see it coming a mile ahead and you know what the outcome will be from the word  “Go”. Meanwhile, you have to slough through three books (and four movies) of the characters making fools of themselves. For me, this makes it difficult to take the characters seriously, and to see them as mature, interesting characters when they can’t decide which handsome, perfect boy makes them feel more tingly inside!

2). It’s frankly sexist. The formula is always one young woman and two men fighting for her affection. It is never used the other way around, because a man leading on two women instantly labels him a scumbag. Every reader immediately writes him off as a cheating, lying lowlife.

Case in point The 100 (the television show, sadly, I am a bad english major and did not read the book first…). Clarke and Finn find themselves falling in love after stranded on Earth. When Finn’s girlfriend, Raven, from their space station home appears on Earth, there is the brief introduction of a love triangle. Except for the fact that Clarke simply WALKS AWAY (so easy) the minute she realizes Finn is taken. She is understandably hurt that Finn kept a girlfriend under wraps, but she has no intention of carrying on a relationship with him now that she knows. Raven, when she finds out about Finn and Clarke, is angry. She calls Finn unfaithful, accuses him of cheating. The girls do not fight over the axis of their triangle, there is no lying or hiding of one relationship behind the back of the other. Finn is torn between the two young women he has fallen for, but he works it out with one AND THEN the other (very simple). Although, there is a considerable amount of hurt feelings and anger to work out first, which is much more honest than everyone being okay with the situation.  It is never given the opportunity to turn into a long, drawn out lover’s quarrel, because the parties are not willing to carry it on.

Since this is the case, that a woman in always the object of the combined affection of two men, I call shenanigans. It paints women as weak willed objects of romantic attention who will lie to maintain a level of romantic attention. And while everyone recognize the behavior as deplorable when a man is in that position, a woman in that place is normal, we see it all the time.

3). It's overused, and often in novels where it doesn’t seem to fit and then seems forced. Like the Hunger Games. Few love triangles have irked me quite like the Peeta- Katniss- Gale relationship. Everything that Katniss is; strong, fiercely protective, laser focused, serious, and she gets trapped in a f#$ing love triangle! A wishy-washy, I don’t know what I want, what do you mean you love ME kind of attitude that makes women appear to only care about their appearance and whether the boy likes them back. There is nothing in Katniss’s character as she is described in the books that makes her indecision seem plausible.

Also, these relationship issues could often be avoided with my favorite bit of romantic advice from author John Green.  “Use your words!” A few words of explanation could save everyone a heap of trouble in the long run. “I have a boyfriend” “I like so-in-so” “I don’t know how I feel”. Voila! All done.

So it is, in my opinion, lazy writing. Used in place of more unique or interesting conflict in the romantic relationship of the characters. To prove to the readers that although your heroine is awkward or doesn’t see that she is beautiful, that she is in fact desirable. See, look how desirable she is, two men are in love with her, two men are fighting for her! Instead of trusting your audience to be smart enough to realize that she is smart and kind, and has perfect aim with a bow, or loves her family dearly, and that is enough to make her worthy of being wanted.

Relationships are hard. In real life and in literature romance is complicated and full of emotion. But no one in real life is permitted to act in this way without consequence, no one would put up with this treatment (I should hope). Novels are supposed to be places for us to escape the lives that we live, but they are most interesting when they are decent representations real life. There are better ways to create romantic tension than this.

Too Many Women

I have read two blog posts recently about how there are too many female protagonists in YA literature. That it is in fact “getting annoying” how many women there are in lead roles and how few male main characters there are. I was reminded that “you can write about male characters too”. One blogger pointed out that the reason was probably because all the writers are women and where are all the male authors?

(John Green, Ransom Riggs, Rick Riordan, Eoin Colfer, James Dashner, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman… sorry just the first names that came to mind when answering that question. I don’t think the male authors are in hiding. They seem to being doing pretty well for themselves, creating interesting and new content, making movies, writing best sellers...)

I am appalled. These are female bloggers. Women who are annoyed at how many female main characters there are in YA novels and how few men are taking the lead in the genre. These are women who want to see their sisters thrown back into the boring secondary character pool. The love interest, the sex object, the bitch, the cheerleader, the mean girl, the girl next door.

For so so long, there was no such thing as a female protagonist. For the longest time women weren’t even allowed to be published! Those who did, changed their names, or were considered less respectable for their chosen career. For so long, the few female characters we were given were two dimensional, weak, or love interests for the strapping male hero.

For the first time in a long time, we have strong, complex, interesting female characters who save the world, who lead the charge, who sit on the throne, who overthrow the government, who make the jokes, who save the guy. And the minute it happens, we are subjected to the complaint that there are too many. Too many strong women, too many interesting women, too many women who don’t need a man’s help, who don’t need to be saved.

JK Rowling was told to change her name because “boys don’t read books by female authors”. That was less than twenty years ago! Do you really want to tell the female writers seeing success today that you are sick of seeing their names in bookstores? That we need more men in a male dominated career?

We aren’t writing from a female perspective because it’s what “all the cool kids are doing”, we are writing women’s stories because they deserve to be told. Because we are sick of sitting at home and waiting for the hero to come back to us, waiting in the tower to be saved, waiting for the world to end with wrung hands and anxious brows.

These arguments are the same ones that fuel the anger that the new Ghostbusters movie is all women. Sure there can be women in the movie, but why did they ALL have to be women? Couldn't there have been one? Wouldn’t that have been enough representation?

No. Being the token woman is not enough to make up for years of being ignored or stereotyped or abused.

Fifteen years of successful female authors writing interesting female characters does not make up for the hundreds of years when their stories were considered second class.

The solution is not to move backwards, but to keep moving forward. Keep writing strong characters and make their gender the least exciting or important thing about them. Leave romance out of the quest to save the world. Turn the gender roles on their head, upside down, sideways, backwards. Read books by people different than you, read about people different than you. Write books about women that appeal to all people, write books about men that appeal to all people.

And in the meantime, let’s not forget to mention that diversity that we drastically need. LIke the fact that more than 95% of the main characters in novels in the last two years were white. That only 4% of characters were black, 1% were latino. When is the last time you read a book about someone who was less than what we consider “able-bodied”? There are so many stories to be told and we are stuck telling the same one over and over again and complaining at the perceived lack of white boys at the helm.

Girl in Blue

She likes to visit the cemetery on gray days. The days when the air is full of the coolness of clouds and the edges of shadows blur into nothingness.  She moves gracefully through the lines of stone grave markers, her white fingers running over the rough top of tombstones as she passes. She hums a tuneless melody as she walks, her hair blowing around her angular face in the cold breeze. A white rose dangles from her fingertips. She wanders aimlessly through the rows of stone monuments, pausing now and then to read a name, to ponder on  a life summed up in the single dash between two dates.

She comes to a secluded corner of the cemetery, a small space overrun with weeds and fallen leaves. A stone stands tall in the far corner. A stone with the simple engraving, in memory of the girl in blue. There is only the date of death scrawled under the notation, killed by a train. There is no birth date and no dash. No indication that she lived a life at all, only the description of her dress at the time of her death.
Everything else about her was forgotten.

She lowers herself to sit by the stone, the cold in the air seeping into her bones and making her movement slow and halted. With frozen fingertips she brushes away the layer of dead leaves along the bottom of the stone, searching for the words that bring peace to a tumultuous existence, unknown but not forgotten.

The girl in blue who was killed by a train many years ago on a cold Christmas Eve has not been forgotten, but she was never known. Those who buried her here did not line the coffin with love notes and flowers, they did not know who to send the heartbreaking telegram to, which newspaper to run the obituary in, who to invite into mourning. They left her in the blue dress because it was the only thing they knew about her. Her broken body too twisted and shattered to tell any story except for the gruesome one of her death. They could not tell her age, or even whether she had been beautiful in life. No one is beautiful in death, the cold grey mask of emptiness covers the features so perfectly, but hides them so completely.  

But she was not forgotten. The girl buried in the blue dress lay here still with no one come to claim her, but the stone stood tall and proud, declaring, here I am. Here I lay until the end of days, a girl in a blue dress.

“But I know you,” she whispers, the words leaving her dry lips like the scream of wind through a canyon.

She rises from her spot among the weeds and lays the white rose atop the gray stone. She runs her gray hands down her blue dress, smoothing out the wrinkles and the moth eaten holes. Her gray skin turns to smoke, and the transparent fog over her thin, sharp face shifts and shutters as a cold wind whips through her bones. She turns away.  A few stones down from her own quite tomb she vanishes into the cold gray air.

Her Super Sunday

Rosie sat on the curb as twilight grew heavy around her. She absentmindedly rubbed the toes of her converse sneakers together, making the rubber squeak. She tangled  her fingers in the cut off hem of the short denim skirt she snuck out of the house in. She had a school backpack at her feet, the homework and notebooks from the day before replaced with a toothbrush, some cash and a change of clothes. She was waiting for her boyfriend, JJ. He was running late, and it was getting colder on that concrete curb.

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Dark Matter

This week on my ten minute break in the middle of a five hour shift I scribbled the beginning of a short story on the back of a receipt. In a hurry I left the note on the desk in the back room and went back to work. A couple of hours later, a co-worker full of jesting concern asked me why there was a series of notes about sex trafficking and the super bowl on the desk. Bright red and fumbling I tried to explain about the story I was writing, about the passionate hatred that rose up in my chest thinking about the thousands of girls who will be bought and sold, used and abused and left behind to rot this weekend while the rest of us eat chips and salsa, drink a beer and watch the big game. Before I could gain my composure enough to make intelligent or thoughtful arguments, my co-worker was clearly uncomfortable and the conversation died off.

It’s the same discomfort I feel when people would ask me what my first novel-project was about. Explaining to people who know me well, who know me as an easy going naive, good-natured girl, that I wrote a novel about suicide and self harm and depression, is no easy task. Not everyone understands how I came about to write such a dark story, why I was interested in writing about such sad things. And when I explain that the story I’m writing this week is about abuse and trafficking and kidnapping, I think a lot of people don’t understand why a nice girl like me would write something so uncomfortable.

The story that I am sharing this week (a few days late) is uncomfortable, is dark, is, frankly, evil. But my intention is never to glorify, to romanticize, to indulge in the darkness. I know that it is not easy to look the evil in this world, that it would be so much easier to brush it under the rug, to pretend it never happened, to change the channel, to fold over the newspaper, to ignore it. Especially in the culture of the church, where we are encouraged to talk about the good things that God has done for us, but spare the details. We are encouraged to keep it PG, to edit out the really hard stuff. After all, we don’t want to glorify the darkness. We don’t want to give it a foothold, to sensationalize it, give it power.

But I think there a some very important reasons that I must not hide from the darkness, as a writer, as a Christian, as someone who has dealt with their fair share of darkness in the world. 

Especially as a writer. The stories that we love, the ones that really stay with us, that impacted us, that changed our hearts and minds, had a lot of really dark stuff in it. Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, Voldemort (or Umbridge) in Harry Potter, The Capital, the stepmother, the tyrant.

There are a few reasons that I will shy away from the darker aspects of storytelling. I want to share them with you, especially before you go and read this weeks story. I want you to understand my motives, to pull back the curtain and show you the inner workings for a minute.

Villainy is vital to good storytelling. The darkness is what lets us know that things have to change. That there are things worth fighting. There is a reason that the good guys are standing up to the villain, that you will root for them to win no matter what obstacle they come across. A really truly evil villain is what makes the story worth reading, the stakes being high is what makes the battle worth winning. If Voldemort had just been kind of mean, just been a bully at school and a small minded, low achiever with no influence, no drive, Harry would have been crazy for fighting so hard. There would have been no reason for him to keep skipping school, to keep running off, to keep breaking rules and keep fighting. If the tyrant isn't evil, why are we fighting a revolution? If there is no darkness, the light is hard to see.

As a writer, I want my books to mean something. I want them to impact people's hearts and minds. The fight between good and evil is vital to that ability to impact.

Additionally, it is honest. It’s real. The world is full of hard things, bad things, horrific, truly and really messed up things. We go through dark times, we struggle with evil, we fight and we overcome. For me, writing is a way to explain the hard things that happen, start to make sense of them. The storytelling begins create a balm for our hurting souls. For me, stories are part of the healing process.

Telling the story takes the power back from the evil things that have happened. If we keep them hidden, keep them secret, keep them in the dark, they will only grow in their power over us. If we give voice to them and to the hard fought victory, we take back out own power over them. God’s power over them.

When I experience a panic attack, the irrational fears of the very worst things that can happen that cripple me, drop me to the floor, unable to move or think or breathe. Saying aloud what I am afraid of, speaking out loud the very worst thing that could happen, is what puts me back in control of my thoughts. Saying aloud “I am afraid of being alone” banishes the fears from the dark corners and in the spotlight of what is true, their lose their grip on my subconscious.

Ray Bradbury encouraged new writers to write about the things they love. To find joy in writing about the science fiction, the gorillas, the robots. (Or princesses and quests and magical items!) But he also encouraged writers to write about the things that scare them, to give voice to the fear lurking in the background and put skin on the skeletons in the closet. They don’t look so frightening when we give them clumsy bodies. And to write about the things that piss you off. To take the anger that burns under your skin when you witness injustice or get cut off in your car, put it to words and let it transform into something more powerful than anger. Sometimes it feels like there isn't much you can do against the surging tide of evil in the world. And a lot of times there isn't anything you can do. But I can write stories. I can put the anger and sadness and heartbreak into words, into stories and at least try to make sense of it.

I know that the story this week is going to be hard to read, it is going to make you uncomfortable, and I want you to know that going into it. But it is an important story to tell and to read. I don't really feel bad ruining the fun of the superbowl, that is true. I do want you to be safe though. I want you to choose which darkness you allow yourself to grapple with and which you rightfully choose to keep your heart safe from. So I understand if you tread with caution. I understand if you stay away from the darker stories. You have the freedom to choose what you read and what you don't care to and I want you to exercise that right.

This week's story, about a young girl's nasty experience at the superbowl goes up in a few, keep this mind as you read it.