Strong Women: Building a Character’s Background

Posted by Sandy Parks

www.sandyparksauthor.com

This week includes and celebrates Worldwide Women in Aviation week, Women in Construction week, International Women’s Day, and Women’s History month. Whew, and I probably missed a few. That’s great to know, but what do these celebrations have to do with building characters?

Any writer wants their female protagonist to be strong (or achieve that through the story), but her background must explain how she became a doctor/lawyer/pilot/spy when she came from a troubled, impoverished, or lacking of support background. Writers frequently make the heroine a successful person who climbed up by her bootstraps, often times via unbelievable circumstances. That inconvenient necessity of getting from A to B is glossed over. She is a doctor because her cancer-ridden, drug addict mother left her abandoned at a young age. Motivation, yes, but hmm. How did she get from there to having the grades, the drive, and the funds for all the education required?

How does building characters connect to these women’s week celebrations? For one, there are often events during those weeks that are specifically aimed at young women of school age to entice them into particular fields. One is happening this week near me and is sponsored by the 99s, a women’s pilot organization. They offer free first rides and hands on seminars about being a pilot. They follow up these events with scholarships to encourage women to learn how to fly or hone other skills, and often provide mentorships to get young women jobs and internships. Many a young teen working at an airfield has gone on to be an aviation mechanic or pilot.

First flight for young girl at Women In Aviation Week activity Fly it Forward.
Photo by S.Parks

Other organizations do similar things. So if your character comes from a low income family, or is orphaned, or lacks a support system, hook her up with a mentor, give her an opportunity to try her hand at construction or mechanics or business, or just about any field (especially those under-represented by women), and then let her grow. Here’s an example. For extra money, your character cleans the church after services. The pastor has a flying ministry so takes her for a flight. When she shows interest in aviation, he gets her a job at the local airfield where she gets interested in working on the planes. The head mechanic starts to teach her and suggests she eventually apply for a training scholarship from the women’s mechanic organization. Sounds boring, but it builds a plausible background for why your gal can manipulate an aircraft or even car engine with ease.

Girls waiting at tarmac gate. A female member of the Civil Air Patrol is
running ramp safety with the CAP cadets.

Boys and girls wait for their first flight at an
Experimental Aircraft Associations Young Eagles day (free first flight). 

Where can mentors come from? The woman who flies her plane on the day your character shows up at a local hangar for the free flight. Or an aerobatic pilot at the local airshow where the young girl waits to get an autograph from her favorite flyer. Or a “big brother” or “sister” who comes into her community to assist? The special mentor may also add another layer to your story and be that missing mother or father figure, or be the comedic release in your story.

99s who offered free rides at event and often act as mentors
to women interested in flying. All ages and varying careers.

Young fan standing before Patty Wagstaff's aerobatic plane at an airshow. Patty is a multiple National Aerobatic champion, instructor, and supporter of women in aviation. Photo S. Parks

All in all, a woman who works hard to build/grow into the person she is today, is more likely to have the strength to be the super heroine we want in our stories. So start thinking about that background/backstory and how it can play into building the character you need to make the story believable. Give her an opportunity to become interested in her chosen field, a mentor to guide her, and scholarships/internships to carry her to success.

SOMETIMES I JUST CAN'T WRITE LINEAR

(This is from a newsletter article i wrote for the DARA June 2012 issue. I've been crazy busy with the day job so I thought I'd share this with you instead of trying to rush through a quickie drive-by blog post.)

I've discovered something about the writing process with my latest work in progress I didn't know before. Sometimes I just can't write linear. Linear always worked well for me in the past—I'd outline my story, know exactly where I needed to go and how I needed to get there. Start at the beginning and move forward, chapter by chapter. There'd be a beginning, a middle, a big black moment and the end. Nice and straight-forward, right?

Not with my latest story. First, I had a dream. Not unusual, I dream all the time. But this was a bit different, it told a story. Not a big story, more like a long scene, but it was so complete and so vivid I wrote it down and sent it to one of my critique partners, thinking in the back of my mind it might work for a short magazine story or something along those lines. She loved it.

Yet something was missing. I felt I needed to tell the reader what led up to this momentous scene. Whoa, wait a minute, that meant the big scene I'd written was actually the end of the story. That's not how I write. I'm supposed to write the beginning, then the middle and then the end. How in the world do I make it work going in the opposite direction?

So, I thought about it. What brought my characters to this place in the story? They had their goal, motivation and conflict all handled nicely in the big scene I'd already written, tied up with a bow and finished—now I needed to backtrack and tell the reader the events that brought us to this place.

So I started with backstory—no not what you're thinking—I outlined a bit of backstory to flesh out the characters more fully, give them more depth, a reason they needed the big scene to happen (since I'd already written this great ending). Once I realized why the characters needed the resolution I'd given them I was able to go back and write chapters from the perspective of the various players in my drama, weaving them together from character to character, chapter by chapter, even out of order, and fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

If you're like me, you do the outside pieces of the puzzle first, creating the frame to fill in. It's the same with story-telling. In this instance the outside, the framework, just happened to be the end first, and filling in and completing the picture came afterwards, piece by piece, until I had the whole.

The process of writing is a growing and evolving one with each person developing and honing the skill-sets that work for them. Plotters, pantsers, linear writers or puzzler fitters, find what works for you and the story you're telling. Like I said, sometimes I can't write linear. Sometimes I can. Find what works for you and do what you do best—WRITE.