Once in a long while you read a book that fundamentally forces you to rethink, re-examine, and reconstruct the way you build your characters in your stories, and Girl Land by Caitlin Flanagan did that for me. (My review is also up on amazon.com.) Flanagan’s book takes a brutally honest and unflinching look at the problems, challenges, dilemmas, and pyschological obstacles facing todays adolescent girls. It’s complex and layered. (BTW, I bought the book and didn’t get it as a freebie from the author or publisher.)
I found Girl Land invaluable as a parent to help me understand my daughter’s journey through her teen years (although about 10 years late for me) but also very important as a writer. My novels are character driven with plenty of action and I consciously build strong, young, female characters into all of them. Story, as writers know, is built on conflict, and Flanagan’s book does a great job of exposing all the subtle and not-so subtle conflicts and tensions girls face in today’s society.
But, these conflicts also work for historical fiction. Isabella, for example, is a 18th century teenage pirate captain in The Pirate of Panther Bay, and an important part of her personal struggle is coming to grips with her own identity and purpose in life. She must survive in a harsh, violent, sexist world and come to terms with the men in her life, both the good, the bad, and the downright evil. Yet, I conceived her character (pyschologically) as a girl with 21st century sensibilities, maturing into a woman, and her relationships reflect that. (In this sense, I hoped her character would be a legacy for my own daughter who was a pre-teen when the book was published.) This strong sense of individuality and the yearning for purpose has been one of the enduring features of her character that resonates with my readers, girls especially. She ends up much stronger at the end, but her personal life is much more complicated.
Also, in my more recent middle-grade novel, A Warrior’s Soul, Lucy’s character is similarly strong. Unlike Isabella, her character is nested in an awkwardly but ultimately mutually supportive relationship with her peer, Luke. I haven’t developed Lucy’s character as fully as Isabella in the first book, but my plan for book 3 in the Path of the Warrior series (even before reading Flanagan’s book) is to put her at the center and have her deal with many of challenges provocatively explored in Girl Land. Flanagan’s book has given me the framework and tools for taking Lucy’s character to a whole new level, and the plot and pace of the story should benefit tremendously.
