Let the Voyeurs In

The most transformative lessons in my life are the ones that make me consider the sort of person I want to be. I’m talking about, ‘Who am I?’ in those I’m-all-alone-and-there-ain’t-nobody-that-can-ever-find-me-muhaha kind of situations.

I think that’s a fair and introspective question for people to ask themselves. I also think that question is a freakin’ gold mine for writers.

As writers, we can take these highly intimate, naked moments and turn them into something voyeuristic. It doesn’t matter if our characters are self-honest or self-delusional in these private moments, we can lay their most intimate choices bare for our readers.

I’ll give an example of this from my own life. It’s a real-life experience that I leveraged in my book CRAVINGS. It’s the story of myself as a kid and growing into a young man. I’m trying to avoid a cheesy Spiderman homage here, but it is a story where I discover the power inherent in an adult, male body and the responsibility that comes along with that power.

I’m a big guy. I grew up using handsaws to fell trees for firewood, digging postholes for fences, and carrying five-gallon buckets of steaming water to thaw the horses’ frozen water barrels. I got my first fulltime labor job when I was twelve. By the time I was seventeen, I had a powerful physical frame just like a lot of rural farm kids. When I was seventeen, I didn’t give much thought to anyone or anything else around me just like teenaged boys on every planet in the universe.

In addition to horses, goats, rabbits, ducks and one ill-fated stint with turkeys (seriously… both of my parents still bear the scars), my family always had a dog or three. One of our dogs was a Springer Spaniel that my sister named Gretchen.

Gretchen was a bit twitchy at the best of times and she unfortunately suffered from something called Springer Rage. It’s a real thing and a sad thing. You can look it up. Essentially, though, Gretchen was subject to random bouts of violent behavior. The whole family knew this. We dealt with it and got on with our lives.

My family was hanging out in our living room one evening. My parents each sat in their chairs, reading. My sister and brother were piled on one side of our couch and there, sprawled across the other side, was Gretchen.

With no space left to sit, I flopped down on the floor in front of the couch. Gretchen’s loose wires crossed and she lunged at me, jaws snapping. I caught her – like I said, we were all used to her fits – but she bit me once in the face.

I wasn’t hurt, thankfully. That would have been the death of the dog. But it scared me. And my reaction to that fear was violent.

One wall of that room is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. It was six, maybe seven feet away from where I held Gretchen by the neck. I threw her that distance. She struck the shelves near my six-foot height. When she landed, she dragged herself mewling over to me.

God save us from the brainless acts of young men.

All this set up is for the delivery of one line of dialogue. It came from my father. He took my arm and pulled me several steps down the hallway. I remember that I was still shaking when he told me this. “Son, you’re a man now. You can kill that dog, but you can’t hurt her.”

The meaning of those words has changed for me over the years, too much so to include in an already overly long blog post. But I think the evolution of meaning only goes to underscore the personal significance those words have held for me. They remind me of action, reaction and consequence in a deeply private and personal way.

I harnessed that significance when writing CRAVINGS. It’s not the plot of the book or even a theme for that matter. However, I was able to leverage that introspection-inducing experience to frame the consequences of my protagonist’s choices. Also, it underpins and humanizes the motivations behind one of the story’s antagonists.

That little anecdote does a lot of heavy lifting in the book. It takes a type or kind of experience that is generally very private and exposes it. Shines a light on it. And, hopefully, it allows readers to experience that intimate process as their own.

Andy Rogers is an Alaskan father, husband, outdoorsman, writer, cartoonist, and gamer. We’re talking dice and cards here, folks. You can keep your gadgets.

Find Andy online at arogers907.wordpress.com or follow his webcomic, Droblar, at droblar.com

If you had been among the small group of neighbourhood boys with whom I played Star Wars, back in 1977, you would have heard this phrase a lot. We were, like most kids who were eight-years-old when Lucas’s opus came out, obsessed with Star Wars. For me, our re-creation of the world of Luke Skywalker was not just play, it was a portal to another dimension, a chance to become a swashbuckling space hero.

The only setback to playing Star Wars was that, as the group’s only female, I was always cast as Princess Leia when I really—I mean really, really, really, REALLY—wanted to be Han Solo.

Don’t get me wrong, Leia was great. She was spunky, intelligent, and ended up rescuing her rescuers with that crazy gargbage chute escape. (How was she supposed to know a tentacled monster lived down there, or that the walls would slowly start compacting the trash?) But let’s get real, Leia was a princess. She wore a dress (gown?), she pleaded to Obi Wan Kenobi for help, and she was selflessly devoted to her cause. Sharp tongue aside, Leia was about being good, pure, and sacrificing everything for the well being of others. As women are supposed to do.

Blech.

Okay, okay, I’m being a bit hard on her but I (really) wanted to be Han Solo. There were no female Han Solos out there. Have a look and then  tell me you don’t see the difference…

Compared to some of the other fictional role models out there, however, the difference between Han and Leia was minimal. I was a child of the 70’s and 80’s, which meant I grew up with sci-fi/fantasy images like this:

Occasionally, fictional females could be brave, intelligent, sassy, and strong, but they had to do all that behind the real heroes—the men. Even one of my all time fave TV shows, Battlestar Galactica was not immune to this.

Or, females could be the heroes, but they also had to be really pretty and wear dresses and makeup and have awesome hair. They usually had a male overseeing them, too. Why? Because they were women. Duh.

It wasn’t until the late 80’s that fictional female heroes who didn’t conform to the stereotypes started to show up on my radar. I will never forget this moment:

More and more, fictional females would start taking the lead. Some would even replace their former male counterparts.

When I created the character of Ama Kalder, for Warpworld, I wanted her to be the kind of woman eight-year-old me would have been happy to play. Because of that, Ama swears, she drinks, she fights, she can’t cook worth beans, she hates dresses, she has her own boat, and she wants to do whatever the men do, no matter what anyone else thinks of that. Eight-year-old me would have loved Ama, I bet some of the boys would have wanted to play her, too.

Ama is not invincible. She’s also not a man loosely disguised as a woman, an important distinction. Nothing irks me more than the idea that in order to be a kick-ass hero a female character must rid herself of all female traits.

As the second book in the Warpworld series, Wasteland Renegades, undergoes the final polish before publication, I’ve been thinking about what makes a woman strong, both in fiction and in real life. In Wasteland Renegades, Ama’s independent and rebellious nature gets her into all kinds of trouble, and her strength is tested in a way she could have never prepared for. I think for most of us, women and men alike, we only find out how strong we really are when things are at their worst. Sometimes strength is standing fist-to-fist with an enemy, but sometimes it’s just holding on when the world tries to break you in hundreds of small ways.

Through my adult life, I’ve been lucky to connect with, and be inspired by, a whole crew of strong women. These gutsy females are leaders, adventurers, entrepreneurs, risk takers, humanitarians, and, in all cases, have taken the road less traveled. They live in every corner of the world and are all ages. They have been, and continue to be, my Han Solos.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of these amazing Women of Character, their stories and their words of wisdom with you. If you’ve got a Woman of Character story of your own, please share it with us. You never know who you might inspire.

As Han would say…

“Here’s where the fun begins.”

~Kristene