Rory Gilmore, Hermione Granger, and what happens when clever girls grow up

While I wasn’t able to watch the Gilmore Girls revival over Thanksgiving, I spent the following Saturday on the couch with a friend, bingeing on all four episodes. During the run of the show, I’d usually found Lauren Graham’s Lorelei the more interesting character, as she juggled romantic relationships, raising Rory, and her inn-owning ambitions along with her rebellious and often immature nature. Rory, a book smart good girl, had her own paradoxes – the relationship with bad boy Jess; sleeping with married ex Dean – but her essential nature was a person who appreciated systems, who figured them out and figured how to be successful within them. This is the type of person who does well in school, who ingratiates herself with her biggest enemy, and who attends an Ivy League college.

Or maybe Hogwarts.

Rory may not be a witch, but she has quite a bit in common with Hermione Granger, another straight-A student with questionable parentage. Hermione was more rebellious than Rory, but then again, she had to be. Voldemort wasn’t moving in on Chilton or Yale; Rory’s biggest rebellion was dropping out of Yale and moving into Richard and Emily’s pool house. But at the end of the series, she graduated from Yale and spurned Logan’s proposal in order to cover Senator Obama’s campaign for president. Similarly, after helping Harry vanquish Voldemort, Hermione went back to Hogwarts for her final year.

This year, fans were lucky enough to be reunited with both young women. Rory is now 32, and Hermione is in her late 30s in the Rowling-approved play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Unfortunately, adulthood has been rough for both women.

During the run of the Gilmore Girls series, I never bought Rory as a future journalist. A journalism major myself, I noted that the people around me were obsessed with current events and a lot more aware of the outside world than the typical college student. (This is also why I never became a journalist.) For all her pop-culture references, Rory spent a lot of time in her own head, reading famous novels and enjoying isolated Stars Hollow. Even though Mitchum Huntzberger was supposed to be a bad guy for telling Rory he didn’t think she was cut out to be a journalist, I agreed with him.

So I wasn’t too surprised to see Rory floundering as a freelance journalist, a career that requires a person to go beyond pre-set rules and systems, to flout convention, to question and probe and examine beyond what is presented as truth. Even so, what took her so long? When we last saw Rory in 2007, she was primed for an explosive career. As a member of the pool covering Obama, she would have become part of the White House press corps after he was elected. If she had been cut out for journalism, that path easily would have led to her becoming the next Christiane Amanpour. And if not, the contacts she made could have led her to the business side of publishing. Instead, despite her “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker, Rory’s a mess. She’s nowhere near the smart, determined girl who had to choose between Harvard and Yale.

Which brings me to Hermione, who might have faced the same decision after graduating Hogwarts. In Cursed Child, Hermione is the Ministry of Magic. But she’s a bad one, an administrator who is so careless with an illegal time turner that two below-average teenage wizards are able to crack her spell and find it. (I won’t get into the canon-violation of time travel rules that were carefully spelled out in Prisoner of Azkaban.) Characters constantly talk over her and treat her as an impediment rather than as the cleverest witch of her generation. And in alternate time lines where she does not marry Ron, she becomes a complete mess. Of course the cleverest witch of her time would be nothing without a man! Poor Professor McGonagall is stripped of her own cleverness, also becoming only an impediment.

For the girls who grew up loving these characters, what does it say that they fail to become fully functioning adults? For women who appreciated them as girls and hoped to see them equally successful as women, the disappointment goes beyond the field of entertainment. Fictional role models are just as important as real-life role models. When the writers who created these characters cannot see their clever girls growing into successful adults – when their stories are no longer as important as the stories of the men in their lives, or the sons of these men – where does that leave their fans?

Like the rest of us, watching as the smartest woman of her generation wins the popular vote by nearly three million, and is forced to watch an orange clown ascend to the most powerful office of the free world.

My Pitch for Pitch!

I watch way too much TV, which is one of the reasons I’m behind on my current novel and I haven’t updated my blog in months. Unfortunately it looks like I may be getting back an hour, because my favorite show of the new season isn’t as universally loved as it should be. Do you love shows about strong women? Do you love shows with some soapy elements? Do you love shows about sports? Then you should be watching Pitch.

Pitch revolves around Ginny Baker, the first woman to make it to the MLB in a fictional version of the San Diego Padres. (This is not a far-fetched development, as there are already young women pitching in baseball programs at the college level.) Ginny is 23; she was drafted out of high school; she’s beautiful and African-American. She’s more than a baseball player; she’s a symbol that women can accomplish anything. Her first start was in a sold-out stadium, with eager young girls waving signs with her name. Not surprisingly, she balked – literally and figuratively. How can she play her game and live her life when she's a symbol for half the country?

But Pitch is about more than Ginny and it’s about more than baseball. Like Friday Night Lights, a show to which it’s been favorably compared, Pitch is about the characters and relationships between them as the show explores what it takes to get to the top and stay there. Numerous flashbacks show Ginny’s relationship with her dead father, who was killed in an accident with a drunk driver the night Ginny pitched her high-school team to the state championship. Bill Baker had made it to the minors and dreamed of having a son follow in his footsteps. But Ginny was the one with the golden arm, and guiding her to the pros became the focus of his life, as he sacrificed his marriage and Ginny’s childhood.

The series also explores the relationship between Ginny’s best friend and teammate, Blip, as he navigates the pull between his home life and baseball fame. Then there’s veteran catcher Mike Lawson – Ginny had his poster on her wall growing up – who provides Ginny with guidance but whose body is aging out of the game. Mike is having a secret affair with Ginny’s agent Amelia, who sometimes is more of a mother to Ginny than her actual mother, whom Ginny caught cheating on her father when she was twelve years old. And then there’s Oscar, the Padres’s GM who’s in the middle of his own divorce, trying to save his job while running a losing team. Ginny’s ex-boyfriend Trevor is a catcher on another major league team; she dumped him when he didn’t quit the game as he’d planned.

So lots of opportunity for good, soapy stuff.

But what ties all these characters together is the theme of how hard it is to get to the top of your game and stay there. Ginny didn’t get to the majors through hard work and talent alone – she got there by working harder than just about every man in the league. And while the sexism that greets her is constant and sometimes overt, it’s more of a threatening rain cloud than a violent thunderstorm.

It’s like Friday Night Lights. It’s like Nashville in the baseball world. It has a female lead character. (She’s not Connie Britton; she has more the bite of Olivia Pope than the bleeding heart of Tammi Taylor/Rayna James.) It features minority actors in many roles. Why aren’t more people watching? (On the other hand, we didn’t get a lot of viewers for those shows, either. Natch.)

I never played baseball (I played softball for a season or two. I was terrible.). But my son plays. I’ve had a front seat to his struggles… and often that front seat was the car seat, as I drove him to practices, games, lessons, showcases to different states, and college visits. (I even wrote a book based on the early years, KEEPING SCORE. You can buy it here.)

You don’t need to know the infield fly rule in order to appreciate this show. It does help to have an appreciation for the fact that following a dream takes hard, hard work. And achieving the dream isn’t the end of the story. Ginny is the first female professional baseball player. Only seven hundred or so people play baseball at the major league level. Her hard work is worth following. I am particularly hopeful that the show will feature flashbacks to her junior and senior years of high school, when she’d be going on college visits and taking part in Perfect Game showcases. Which college did she commit to before she was drafted? (Most top baseball players commit to colleges their sophomore or junior years of high school. Since they are not draft-eligible until the end of their senior year of high school, no top player puts off committing in the hopes of getting drafted.)

Pitch is on Fox, Thursday nights at 9. Originally the network was going to hold off till the spring, but with Scandal on hiatus due to Kerry Washington’s new baby, they thought Scandal’s viewers would be attracted to this show. Unfortunately, they seem to be watching Notorious instead. The fall debut works nicely with the excitement of post-season baseball, but I think a Wednesday at 10 slot – the old Nashville airing – would have worked better.

Remember how TV fans lamented that they hadn’t found Friday Night Lights until it was too late? Don’t make the same mistake with Pitch!

How to Be an Adult

Back-to-school photos are popping up all over Facebook. From my own newsfeed, the youngest celebrating his first day at kindergarten while the oldest her senior year in college. Tomorrow, my son – who refused college photos but sent me a picture of his Capitol Hill ID badge when he was interning this summer – jets off for his first year of graduate school. This generation of kids, parented by us so-called “helicopter parents,” should be the most prepared young adults ever to tackle the real world. But last night I came home to a sinkful of dirty dishes and a 22-year-old who informed me he didn’t know which ones should be washed and which ones put in the dishwasher. (To be fair, his 49-year-old father expresses befuddlement at this as well.) I was, needless to say, surprised: This is a young man who had his own apartment the last two years of college, who easily traverses the Washington, D.C. Beltway; who flies on his own and rents cars. (I didn’t check off those last two items till I was in my 30s.) Obviously I had taken his mastery of these steps as proof that he had mastered the ones beneath them. I was wrong.

And I’m not the only parent missing an item or two from my pre-nest-push-out check list. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. are filled with articles written by Millennials complaining about being an adult, not feeling like an adult, being tired of “adulting,” etc. It’s interesting that this generation sees adult as a verb – an action that be started or stopped – rather than a noun, a state of being.

My fellow helicopter parents, we did this.

We felt sorry for our incredibly busy children, who had demanding school schedules, travel sports, and a plethora of “volunteer” commitments, required both by exclusive colleges and public and private school graduation requirements. (Ask a Gen Xer what they had to do to get into the University of Maryland College Park, and weep at the answer.) Our kids were only getting five hours of sleep, for pete’s sake! Sure, we could have taken away their smart phones, but maybe they really were texting about homework, not sexting. So we cooked their dinners and didn’t ask for help with the dishes. We did their laundry. We drove them to school so they could catch up on homework or sleep.

And now they are college graduates and looking wide-eyed at dirty dishes, not to mention paying their own way by working real jobs that offer low pay and only two weeks of vacation a year. How, they ask, will they spend a month in Italy with only two weeks of vacation?

So they apply to graduate school, and put off the “adult” conversation for another two to four years. Perhaps by the time they’re too old to be on their parents’ health insurance policy, they will feel like full-fledged adults.

But probably not.

So if you’re like me, and you somehow assumed that your offspring’s incredible grasp of current affairs meant that he also knew how to close the lid on a top-loading washer, I’m offering a list of milestones that every son and daughter should reach before moving out of the house for good. (If they don’t know how to do these things, that doesn’t mean they get to stay forever.) In order to truly be considered adults, they should be able to:

 Grocery shop for balanced meals
 Cook simple meals and follow recipes for more complicated ones
 Know what to do and who to call if in a car accident
 The rules of tipping
 Keep a relatively clean home
 Routinely wash sheets and towels
 Do laundry regularly
 Pay their own bills
 Pay off credit cards every month, or hold only modest balances
 Drink only moderately during celebratory outings, and plan ahead so that driving isn’t an issue
 Make own doctor and dentist appointments and regularly manage preventive car
 Use birth control every time
 Have a realistic picture of their friendships, work relationships and romantic relationships
 RSVP appropriately
 Own up to mistakes (i.e., speeding tickets, broken appliances) and offer restitution
 Solve simple problems without needing help
 Spend a day working and taking care of themselves without whining about “adulting.”

Before you send your child out into the big, wild world, make sure he/she can handle the items on this list.

That is, assuming you can handle them yourself.

Character or Plot Device: Me Before You (Warning: Spoilers)

Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You is a New York Times bestselling book and a blockbuster movie. It’s also arguably the most controversial piece of fiction of the year. Me Before You is about British lost girl Louisa Clarke, who takes a job as a caretaker to quadriplegic Will Traynor. Lou and Will fall in love, but their relationship isn’t enough to keep him from going through with his plan to kill himself, at a special facility in Switzerland created just for the suicidal.

Advocates for the disabled have been less than pleased.

When the book first came out in early 2013, it was well received and noncontroversial. Moyes’s fans are a loyal lot, as are fans of women’s fiction in general. The book was so popular that Moyes wrote a sequel, After You.

Then the movie came out. And the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan.

As a writer, I was dismayed. I would never want one of my characters to be seen as representative for everyone who looked like her. And with diversity in books a strong topic in publishing circles, the subtext seems to be that unless you’re a member of a particular class, you shouldn’t feature characters in that class in your writing. In Moyes’s case, Will wasn’t just a particular character, he was a representative of every quadriplegic in the world, and since he did not want to live, Moyes was saying that quadripledgics’ quality of life was so low, that none of them should want to live either. (This wasn’t a point of view I had picked up in the book, which is Louisa’s first person account.) To me, this is a very scary implication – but one that mirrors our society. After all, every time a white man is in the news, he is judged for his actions alone. But a woman, a minority, or a Muslim breaks a law, and he or she is a symbol for every member of his/her gender, race or religion. So Will, a disabled character in a medium that rarely features disabled characters, is a symbol for all disabled people – and not necessarily a flattering one.

I read these criticisms with a heavy heart. A YA novel I’m working on features a morbidly obese teenage girl. Another one I’ve outlined stars a bi-racial teen. Are these characters or symbols? Will I be judged if they are not perfect?

And then I saw the damn movie.

While the movie Me Before You is just as much Louisa’s story as the book Me Before You, there is an impact to seeing certain elements play out on a huge screen rather than in words. Of course Moyers described Will as gorgeous, living in a castle, wealthy beyond measure, brilliant. But it’s one thing to read those words – Louisa’s words – and another to see him for yourself. And in the film, Will seems to have an amazing life. He has two parents who adore him (in the book, they were at odds and his father was having an affair), a funny, reliable male nurse/aide who’s always there, a van to drive him around, a beautiful living area, and a huge TV with lots of DVDs to watch. And then he has Louisa. They fall in love, but it doesn’t make a difference – Will is determined to kill himself, and nothing changes his mind. (I assume psychologists were brought on off-screen, and anti-depressants were involved.) In one scene, Will describes his favorite Parisian restaurant. Louisa wants to go, but Will shoots her down. He wants to remember it – himself – as he was, and not have to worry about his wheelchair not fitting under the table.

The message seems to be there’s no amount of wealth or love that can make up for living in a less-than-perfect body. Yes, Will’s nurse tells Louisa that he’s in pain, and sometimes he can hear Will screaming. (This is never shown.) He has a quick bout with pneumonia. But overall, his life looks worth living. No wonder advocates for the disabled were furious. Will wasn’t a character at all – he was just a plot device.

I am a firm believer of that old writers’ saying, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” In other words, stories are stories, characters are characters, and messages belong in telegrams. But I also find myself questioning some of Moyers’s choices (as I did when I reviewed an earlier book, The Girl You Left Behind. If she had made different ones, would the result be more palatable?

For instance, the choice to make Will come from a wealthy family. Perhaps Moyers chose this so that Will’s desire to kill himself isn’t a result of the incredible cost of care. Had Will’s family been poor or middle class, it would have been a different story – and perhaps the money wouldn’t have been there to hire Louisa. But by making Will wealthy, she made his life easier, and his decision to end it less understandable.

Then there’s the choice to make Will an investment banker rather than an athlete. Although Will is an avid weekend warrior, he works at a desk from 9-5. This is a puzzling choice from Moyers – after all, Will already came from a wealthy family, so it’s not like he needed that hedge fund money to fund his castle. Moreover, Moyers based Will on a real-life rugby player who went to this Swiss facility after becoming paralyzed. It is easier to understand how a professional athlete would see his life being over than a business executive, even if that executive enjoyed kite sailing. (And truthfully, advocates for the disabled were just as angry at the end of Million Dollar Baby.)

Another odd choice was the character of Louisa’s boyfriend Patrick, a personal trainer who trained for marathons in his spare time. This guy was such a bore, it was no wonder Louisa would rather spend time with Will. What was Moyers trying to say by making Will’s foil so obviously physical? That being able-bodied is no guarantee that a person is worth loving? Or that being disabled is so awful that it’s better to be with a boorish personal trainer?

Finally, there was Moyers’s commitment to not giving Louisa the standard happy ending, which I can accept. But why not have Will die of pneumonia after deciding to live for this woman he’d fallen in love with? That would give a sad, ironic ending while showing a disabled character working through emotional issues and choosing to live.

As writers, our job is to tell stories, not send messages. Yet we have an equal responsibility to make sure our characters are fully rounded, and go beyond symbols. While Moyers has no requirement to make any character a hero, she – and all of us – need to create characters that are more than just plot devices. Maybe love isn’t always enough. But if it’s not going to be, the readers need to understand why.

When Perfect is the Enemy of Good

As writers and critical readers, we talk a lot about the conundrum of the unlikeable female protagonist (those unlikeable male protagonists never seem to cause worry). Reviewers are quick to mention if and why the protagonist isn’t someone they’d “like to be friends with,” and even established writers sometimes get the note to make their heroine nicer somehow.

Strangely enough, readers don’t seem to mind them – at least not as the stars of thrillers like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

Lately, though, in my reading – and even my TV-watching – I find myself grappling with the opposite problem: heroines that are just so darn likeable, they’re perfect. These are women who honestly seem to exist without flaws. They never lose their tempers. They never have an unkind thought toward anyone. They always do the right thing. I spend my reading time with them wondering when the hell they are finally going to blow up, or at least do something interesting.

Last week, I was having dinner with a good friend and fellow fan of the TV show Nashville. We agreed that while we still liked her, the character of Rayna – and the show itself – was a lot more interesting when Rayna had flaws. Now she is absolutely perfect, always making the right decisions, never getting too angry, and always being right in the end. (This last point reminded me a little of Kate Walsh’s Addison Montgomery in Private Practice, but at least Addison’s infallible medical judgment was tempered by the fact that her personal life was a constant mess.)

I won’t name the guilty books, but this point hit me as I read Laura Lippman’s Wilde Lake over the weekend. Lippman’s protagonist, a prosecutor named Lu, is very smart and hard-working. She is also extremely competitive, to a point where it has cost her friends and gotten her into trouble. This flaw (which may not have been a flaw if Lu were a guy) made the character so much more interesting than she would have been if she were perfect. It made her human to me. It also illustrated for me how closely a character’s strengths and flaws are related. Of course a smart person is going to be competitive, or smug, or arrogant. It’s the opposite side of the same coin.

Fan fiction writers have long had a term for that perfect character – a “Mary Sue.” (Legend has it that she first appeared in Star Trek fan fiction, as the daughter of Jim Kirk, lover of Spock, amazing space pilot, etc. So, yes, fan fiction is older than the internet. Way older.) “Mary Sue” has outgrown the fan fiction world, and is a shorthand for any character (mostly female) that is too good to be true. And yet, even with the pejorative, more writers are falling into this trap with their female protagonists. (At least the ones I read this past week are.)

Sometimes our protagonists are an extension of ourselves, and sometimes we are blind to our own flaws. I know that I don’t have any, for instance. Okay, sometimes I care too much. (If you don’t know what your flaws are, ask one of your siblings.) But our flaws draw people to us just as much as our strengths do. Use them to develop a well-rounded protagonist.

Then maybe she’ll be called “unlikeable.”

Chapter One

It’s been an exciting few weeks for this particular writer in paradise. I got an agent, finished major changes to my work in progress (I’ll be hearing from my online critique group tomorrow), had a producer-friend option an old screenplay of mine, and watched my son graduate college and head off to DC.

New chapters beget new chapters, and in this case, it means it’s time to start a few myself. (The time may be short, however, depending on the changes my agent wants and changes my critique group recommends on two separate manuscripts.) I have a new script and a new novel I’m working on. Yay!

Not yay. Even though I have a detailed outline for the novel and a general outline for the script, I’m struggling. New beginnings means struggling to find the voice. It means barreling through small scenes that are absolutely necessary to hold the story together but are difficult to write without boring me to death. Getting the words out feels like pulling out fingernails.

Most people probably think that if you’re a writer, that you enjoy writing. Maybe other writers do. Stephen King, for instance. He writes every single day, even on Christmas. He probably really enjoys it.

I like having written. I like going quickly through a finished manuscript, recognizing the errors, and making notes in the margins about how to fix it. I especially like it when I can do that to my own manuscripts. (I’m better with other people’s.)
But the writing… those first drafts … ugh.

The story, the characters, the dialogue, the narrative – it’s never as good on paper as it is in my head. In my head are glorious paragraphs that sing my story and intrigue my readers with every word. On paper – on the screen in front of me – ugh.

Eventually I get there. My current WIP – the one with my critique group – is on draft number nine, and I have a feeling I’ll have at least two more before sending it to my agent. But the process to writing “the end” or “fade out” for the first time is just so painful.
It’s so painful that I decided to write this blog post rather than torture myself with further words, even though today is the only real day this week I could set aside to write.

Or maybe I just need a break …

Crimes Against Other Writers

A few weeks ago, I was at a writers meeting where two new members showed up. After new member #1 described her project, new member #2 came up to her and told her exactly how she should write it. It was mansplaining, writer-style! I was horrified, but I didn’t know either woman well enough to say anything.

So instead I decided to write a blog post.

Of course, this “writersplaining” example isn’t the first time I’ve seen – or been on the receiving end – of a crime committed by another writer. Maybe you’ve committed a few of them yourself! Of course, most writers are very supportive of each other, and create communities that help each other become better writers and sell more books. But sometimes, in our eagerness to help other writers, we cross the line. And, in the words of the estimable Marlo Thomas: “Sometimes help is the kind of help that helping’s all about … and sometimes the help is the kind of help … we all can do without.”

So here’s a list of that second kind of help!

1 – Stealing her story. This should be obvious, but it’s not always. If a writer shares her story with you, that doesn’t mean it’s open season on that idea. And if she shares an incident in her past that she’s not ready to write about, that doesn’t give you the okay to write about it yourself. There are a million ideas out there. Come up with your own. Don’t take anyone else’s.

2 – Telling another writer exactly how she should approach her project. Unless the writer has specifically asked for this type of guidance, keep your mouth shut. It’s her idea and her baby, so let her develop it the way she envisions it.

3 – Offering help you don’t deliver. If you’ve promised your writer friend that you’ll have her manuscript proofread in two weeks, then by God proofread that manuscript in two weeks. Side thought: Don’t make promises you can’t keep. To anyone. Ever.

4 – Mishandling a request for feedback. It is always a tricky, sticky situation when your writer friend asks for feedback and you find major things wrong in the manuscript. And yet, she wouldn’t have asked you if she thought the manuscript was perfect. (If she did think it was perfect, you need more humble writer-friends.) Here are the three ways writers hurt other writers in this process:
 Pulling your punches. If you think it stinks but tell her it just needs some proofreading, you’re setting her up for a bigger fall somewhere down the line.
 Telling her it stinks. Yes, I know what I said above. But a flat-out “it stinks” is crushing and doesn’t help her at all. Be specific about what doesn’t work. Make a few suggestions how those problems could be fixed. Leave her feeling excited about the aspects of the novel that do work. If you can’t do any of that, then don’t respond to requests to read your friends’ manuscripts.
 Telling her to give up on it. Just because you can’t fix it, doesn’t mean she can’t.

5 – Forwarding her project to another writer. Her unpublished work should be completely under her control, and she’s the only one who decides who gets to read it. If you have a friend who could give her good feedback, let her know and let her decide whether to make that contact. But don’t send it along to anyone… even if it’s someone you both know.

6 – Telling her what to write. You have ideas. She has ideas. You write yours, and she can write hers. End of story.

7 – Badmouthing the project behind her back. So you read it and hated it. Don’t tell your mutual writer friends how horrible it was. Let them make up their own minds. Maybe they can help her, even if you couldn’t.

8 – Asking your writer-friend who has an agent to pass your work along. If she believes in your work, (and her agent represents your genre), she will ask you if she can pass it along. If she hasn’t asked, then it’s not good enough.

9 – Pestering a busy writer for notes. Some writers say yes when they should have said no. If they haven’t gotten back to you on your manuscript, take the hint. Next time, ask someone who has more time.

10. Leaving a mean review after her book’s been published. So it wasn’t your cup of tea. There are a million other writers to whom you can offer an objective critique. But if she’s your friend, sing her praises on Amazon or keep your mouth shut.