Sunday, March 01, 2009

Redemption, the Rake and the Reluctant Hero

I have deadline brain. This means that the majority of my existence is—or should be—focused on getting my next contracted book out of the computer and to my editor at Bantam by May 1st. Being I’m only at twenty-thousand words (give or take five hundred) as of this moment, I’m in a fairly serious hurt. I need to create eighty thousand words (at least) in sixty days. And I have a major conference and a minor one tucked in there in April, houseguests for the next week due to the husband’s golf tourney (don’t ask—beyond my ken) and several other promotional and family obligations hovering in the background.

So I’m going to ramble—as you can see from the title above—about redemption, the rake and the reluctant hero because 1) the title sounds good and 2) that’s what I want to talk about.

With Hope’s Folly’s release this week, I’ve been surfing blogs and review sites to see what readers and reviewers think of Philip and Rya. Beyond the obvious reasons for doing this there’s my curiosity about reaction to my character of Admiral Philip Guthrie who, in the world of romance novels, would fit more squarely under the Good Boy banner than the rogue or Bad Boy.
The romance genre—and science fiction romance hasn’t shied from this—is replete with rakes and rogues. Bad boys in need of reformation. Susan Grant penned the fabulous Reef in How To Lose an Extraterrestrial in 10 Days and the wonderfully sexy Finn in Moonstruck. Nora’s JD Robb has Roarke. Robin D Owens has Ruis and a ton of others. Rowena Cherry has her bad boy gods. And the list goes on. There’s even my Sully in Gabriel’s Ghost and Shades of Dark.

Bad boys are fun. And there’s something satisfying about watching a rake succumb to love. We root for Inara and Mal to finally get together in Joss Whedon’s universe. And author Colby Hodge has her sights set on Jayne… If anyone can reform Jayne, it’s Colby aka Cindy Holby.

Philip Guthrie didn’t need reforming. Okay, he needed a kick in the pants over what happened between him and Chaz Bergren but Philip was and is a “good guy.” Honorable. Trustworthy. A veritable Boy Scout.

Which makes him a bit odd as a hero of a romance novel, even a science fiction romance novel. But as I write I’m beginning to discover the lure of the good man.

Good guys need love too.

Maybe I should get a bumper sticker printed up (do starships have a place for bumper stickers?)

Good guys also need redemption, maybe even more than those sexy rogues, because they are good guys. They know when they’ve failed. They hurt deeply when they’ve failed. They know what’s right and what’s wrong. Moreover, they know they’ve tried to do the right thing and when the right thing goes sour, they take the blame inside themselves.

Book reviewer (and former US Naval Academy instructor) Dr. Phil Jason uses this phrase in his review of Folly: “The tug of war between decorum and passion…” and I like that immensely. I think it nicely sums up what happens when a good guy gets his essence pushed to the limit.
http://philjason.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/linnea-sinclairs-steamy-sci-fi-saga/

Lurv-Ala-Mode reviews Philip thusly: “…the weight of this war and the Alliance’s position in it rests on his shoulders. He’s honor and duty-bound to put that above anything else, so he struggles a lot internally with his attraction to Rya. He’s also coming off the heels of the realization that he wasn’t ever there for his ex-wife, Chaz, as much as he could have been. He wasn’t fair to her, wasn’t there for her emotionally, and he wonders how he could ever make any relationship with a woman work.”
http://lurvalamode.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/arc-review-hopes-folly/

A rogue can struggle against doing what he sees to be the wrong thing, but the wrong thing is what comes naturally to him. The good guy, well, doing the wrong thing isn’t even in his vocabulary. So it becomes a very real “tug of war between decorum and passion.”

Which makes it, to me, somehow deeper. Somehow more threatening. As an author, you always ask yourself what a character has to lose? And a loss of honor, a loss of self-respect, is a huge thing.
Which brings me now to the reluctant hero. The good guy who’s essentially minding his own business but finds himself thrust into conflict because it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the only thing to do. Even if he as no clue what he’s doing there.

He’s driven by something even deeper: part honor, part untapped potential and a very real knowledge that he—and someone he cares about—have their backs against the wall. And there’s no way out but the one he has to take.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.” ~Maryanne Williamson

That’s what drives Devin Guthrie—Philip’s youngest brother—in the next book. Devin, like Philip, is good people. Loyal, hard-working, honest. He just doesn’t think of himself as hero material.

Surprise.

Eighty thousand words to go.

~Linnea

HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, Feb. 24, 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

“If we can’t do the impossible, then we need to at least be able to do the unexpected.” —Admiral Philip Guthrie

7 comments:

  1. I thing a nice guy hero is very refreshing.

    I know readers read to experience tension so you don't really want all whitebread vanilla pubbing characters. It seems to me that maybe Romance as a genre has taken avoiding that to an extreme. One of my friends said to me a while back that she likes to read Romance books because all the characters are so psychologically screwed up if you think about them in a real-world way, that they make her feel her life is almost perfect no matter what Career/Family/Personal development issues she has going on at the moment. I think there might be a lot of truth to that.

    To some extent people read Romance get the fantasy ending that they can't get in the real world. I get that. I do understand the bringing a dangerous animal to heal attraction of bad boys, but I also have always found HEA with bad boy heroes sort of hollow. Deep down inside I just can't buy them. I also think they perpetuate a dangerous "If you love him enough he will change" meme that is really, really, really unhealthy.

    I like nice men! Nice does not have to be boring. That may be why I liked Hope's Folly so much.

    You sound so stressed. I almost feel guilty posting a reply that will take up your time. Sending you some powerful support vibes over the Internet. (poof) Wish there was more I could do to help.

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  2. Linnea Sinclair Wrote:
    -----------
    Good guys also need redemption, maybe even more than those sexy rogues, because they are good guys. They know when they’ve failed. They hurt deeply when they’ve failed. They know what’s right and what’s wrong. Moreover, they know they’ve tried to do the right thing and when the right thing goes sour, they take the blame inside themselves.
    --------------

    Linnea Sinclaiar describes Romantic Hero
    -----------------
    The good guy who’s essentially minding his own business but finds himself thrust into conflict because it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s the only thing to do. Even if he as no clue what he’s doing there.

    He’s driven by something even deeper: part honor, part untapped potential and a very real knowledge that he—and someone he cares about—have their backs against the wall. And there’s no way out but the one he has to take.
    ------------

    That second quote defines Henry Paulson deciding to infuse capital into the banks.

    CONFLICTS: Man vs Man, Man vs Nature, Man vs Himself

    The "good guy" story is always about INTERNAL CONFLICT -- about Man vs. Himself (or Woman vs Herself)

    It's the Bad Guy protag who blames his failures on OTHERS or EXTERNAL circumstances. Good Guys look first to their internal failings as the cause for external failure and that's a cultural paradigm that may be under attack right now.

    The real trick for a writer is to SHOW DON'T TELL what is essentially invisible.

    That means you need to WorldBuild yourself a universe of discourse where there is some relationship between what is going on inside the Hero and what happens outside, visible to the reader.

    See my post on the Paradigm Shift
    http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/paradigm-shift.html

    The Paradigm that is Shifting in our culture among our readers is the mathematical description of the relationship between internal conflict and external manifestations of that conflict.

    So writers today need to figure out what their audience thinks is that relationship between internal world and external, then present that ethical or moral "hazard" (as Paulson put it) as a decision the Good Guy Hero has to make.

    "Moral Hazard" is the new buzzword.

    It means that if you treat adults as if they are children, and when they make a mistake you pay the penalty for it, the "cost" as I pointed out in my Paradigm Shift blog entry, then you are teaching them that there is no penalty for doing wrong.

    Then you are responsible for the result of their NEXT action or choice that is made on the assumption there will be no cost comparable to the damage if things go wrong.

    The world is very aware of this dire dilemma right now, so it seems to me a Romance based on that issue ought to get talked about.

    My thesis is that the Worldbuilding part of the writing (which you must do even in a non-SF or non-Fantasy contemporary novel) is the key to conveying this "moral hazard" dimension to the reader and getting them to buy into your character long enough to experience the character's choices.

    You want a practice exercise, try Henry Paulson's decision. PBS did a good FRONTLINE special on what went into that decision.

    OK that was the world financial system at stake -- take the same dynamic and make it a single FAMILY at stake (think about the TV show DALLAS - family prime time soap).

    I'll set up a Worldbuilding exercise on this subject on my editing blog:

    http://www.editingcircle.blogspot.com

    Jacqueline Lichtenberg
    http://www.simegen.com/jl/

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  3. "Rowena Cherry has her bad boy gods"

    Thank you for the shout out.

    That line bothered my inner 'Rhett a little. Yes Djohn-Kronos, Tarrant-Arragon, and Djetth are indeed unrepentent bad boys.

    'Rhett, the anal one, objects. He protests. He is a good boy. He is a virgin and pure of heart and mind and body.

    Two of the three, anyhow.

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  4. Rowena:

    Yep, you got it. Conflict!!!! The inner conflict of the good boy is "reflected" into his environment by his bad boy associates.

    Jacqueline Lichtenberg
    http://www.simegen.com/jl/

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  5. Rowena:

    Yep, you got it. Conflict!!!! The inner conflict of the good boy is "reflected" into his environment by his bad boy associates.

    Jacqueline Lichtenberg
    http://www.simegen.com/jl/

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  6. Google's error reposted that comment. Sorry. JL

    ReplyDelete
  7. JL,

    No worries. Comments: 7 looks better than Comments: 5.

    ReplyDelete