Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
What women want
A random memory of an odd little woman made me realize something about my work in progress: I’ve never once asked myself what my heroine wants from a relationship. Guess I’d better think about that, eh?
I’ll return to Lori (my heroine) in a moment. Here’s the odd little woman:
She was in the College of Chemistry with us at Berkeley. Hong Kong Chinese, upper class British accent, tinier even than my wife, and skinnier, too. If you’d passed her on the street, you would assume she was a sixth- or seventh-grader. Not that any of that is relevant, but it did make her a memorable character. But what really stuck in my mind was a conversation I had with her during one of our chem labs.
She showed me a picture of her fiance: tall, good-looking. “We’re engaged,” she said. Her voice took on an odd baby-girl quality. “He’s going to take care of me.”
I must have said, “Huh?” because she elaborated: she had no intention of using her college degree. She would get the education, graduate, get married, and live happily ever after. She repeated: “He’s going to take care of me.” Damned if she didn’t sound ecstatic about her plans, too.
Her attitude is as foreign to me now as it was then. I can’t understand how a woman bright enough to get a degree from UC Berkeley — from the College of Chemistry, in fact — would be delighted to assume the role of kept woman. Clearly, that’s all she had ever wanted, and had known from the start that her education would be for the purposes of “self improvement” rather than preparation for the job market. But she knew what she wanted, that’s for certain.
Back to my heroine. What does she want? Help me brainstorm this one.
She’s very hormonal, my Lori. I’ve turned the tables on the usual trope and made her the horny one, Brad the one who is more interested in finding love. She feels possessive of Brad (possessive enough to crank up the sexual heat when she’s worried he might be tempted elsewhere), but I’m not sure she knows how long she intends to keep him.
Early on, she doesn’t respect him due to their interactions at work. She likes this lack of respect since she doesn’t want a serious relationship. How could she ever fall in love with a guy she doesn’t respect? She’s a virgin who is tired of her virginity. She knows he’s a virgin, too. She figures she’ll be doing them both a favor — that’s how she rationalizes using him.
Soon, though, he shapes up at work and becomes someone she can respect. She also gets to know him and like him. Right now the relationship is shifting (Brad’s the first one to use the L word) and it seems to me this should cause her no small amount of distress. Her lack of distress — is it (A) inept writing on my part, or (B) the fact she’s still obsessed over losing her virginity? Meanwhile, she’s falling in love but won’t admit it to herself.
As I write this, I realize I’ve written Lori to have a guy’s brain. It’s not unusual (speaking as a Representative Guy) for hormonal concerns to override everything else. Perhaps when she finally gets her rocks off, that’s when the true depth of the relationship will sink in. Cuz, baby, she’s in it deep.
Seat-of-my-pants writing, folks. Like I keep telling you, I have no shame.
D.
The heart wants, what the heart wants (don’t know many people who can ignore it ;o))
BTW did you get my mail?
No, I didn’t! I’ll have to check and see if my emailer thinks you’re spam.
Finally, one day that I read your entry without thinking “OMG, I’ve not emailed you back yet.” LOL.
Doug, it’s not terribly unusual to find similar thinking around here, though it’s equally common to find someone who thinks, “I don’t want a family, and I don’t need a man because I’ve got a career.”
Though it really is a joke when I say I’m going to university to find a rich husband. It’s just that it’d be wonderful to find somebody who can pay for my younger brothers’ education and let me live the life I would love to get accustomed to.
Maybe the L word doesn’t distress her because she now wants more than just sex? She now likes and respects him…definitely more than she once did. So perhaps she’s discovering she really wants a relationship with HIM>
There’s a saying that’s common among women (at least) – men use love for sex, women use sex for love. Sounds lik you’re writing it backwards.
Hi Doug. I just watched a movie, Open Range, and the romance in that was almost the opposite of what you’ve described, but it worked for me! 🙂
I realized, while reading your post, why I’m totally incapable of offering any advice on this subject: it took me a full 10 seconds to realize what you mean by “the L word.”
Hmmm. I’ve really got to read this.
Maybe, Lori’s not freaked by the “L” word because she doesn’t really believe Brad? She thinks he’s confusing sex & love?
Re: the odd woman. There’s something in the HK culture (I suspect that it is the remnants of the old British class system) that encourages that sort of thinking. In Vancouver, we got many thousands of moneyed HK immigrants before the handover, and they really do think (in a big way) that money makes you better than other people. Of course, we also think that in North America, but Hong Kong culture makes it ok to display it blatantly. I knew of quite a few women who displayed the attitude you describe.
Now, as for Lori: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making her the sexually aggressive one. What I notice, though (and I still feel guilty for not emailing you on this, but I’ve been buuuuuseeeee (said in best 9-year-old-I-don-wanna-do-my-homework-voice)) is that Lori’s personality is rather less developed than Brad’s. I get a sense of what Brad wants, but I don’t know what Lori is after.
Maybe she should spend less time early on feeling swoopily attracted to Brad? Then she’d be just using him to lose her virginity, and then find she’d fallen for him?
Methinks it be a good ‘twist’ that she be thinkin’ with a man’s brain at th’moment. She’s thinkin’ like he’s thinkin’–now that she got what she thinks she was after. Darla’s right: “Maybe, Lori’s not freaked by the “L†word because she doesn’t really believe Brad? She thinks he’s confusing sex & love?”
What happens to th’story if she thinks like a man until th’end? If this doesn’t work for ye, then somewhere in th’course o’ ye tome, she needs t’get an ephiphany o’women-think. Which could send her into a number o’bad ‘women-think’ emotional/medical problems because of the world’s ‘expectations’ of th’behavior of women in relationships.
I don’t know. I be a lesbian Pirate Queen an’ we think with th’feminine an’ masculine sides o’ our brains…
Thanks, folks!
May: you’re in Singapore, aren’t you? I guess I’m not too surprised by this being a common mindset. It was the first time I had encountered it, thought, and I was shocked.
noxcat, Darla: the more I think about it, the more it seems like an omission on my part that she doesn’t react to it(the L word) in SOME way. She may not be honest with herself at first, but she still needs to react in some way.
crystal: isn’t the opposite sort of the usual thing? Woman wants love, guy wants sex?
IL: it ain’t Lizard 😉
Dean: re Lori’s lack of development — I know, and I guess it’s natural, since it’s easier for me to inhabit the guy’s head than the woman’s head. Something I need to focus on in the rewrite. Anyway, I don’t think she’d use him sexually unless she DID find him attractive. I think it would be fairly unpleasant to have sex with someone you weren’t attracted to. Or at least, some alcohol would need to be involved.
Cap’n: it’s reasonable for her to think with a guy’s brain because she’s a general surgery resident. The field is still male-dominated, and the women who are selected for the residency programs tend to be aggressive, type A individuals. Even though I don’t understand Lori as well as I do Brad, she’s still based (roughly) on female general surgeons I’ve known. I wonder, though — exactly what would a women-think epiphany entail?
All I can do is give you my fiction rioting lecture from the various workshops and classes:
I don’t know your characters. Okay, I sort of know them, I’ve met them, but YOU should know EVERYTHING. I don’t mean you should bring it up in the story of course, but to get them to be more like people you ought to know everything. Favorite flavor of ice cream and why. How they reacte when a spider’s in the shower. And why. EVERYTHING. And no one else can tell you the specifics or the whys–they’re yours.
I don’t do this stuff on paper (maybe now and then if I think it’s relevant to the plot). I walk around interviewing characters in my brain–usually on dog walks. I put them in all sorts of situations try out different responses until I hit the one that seems right for that person. Once I get to a point where I’m sort of automatically knowing their responses and knowing that the responses aren’t mine but THEIRS, I can stop.
Anyway, everyone has a different way to deal with this stuff but that’s my Lecture Du Jour.
Oh and you should know them on a level deeper than male/female if such a thing is possible (probably not, since it’s all tied together. *Sounds* good though, doesn’t it. )
And I only wrote all that because you DID ask. Not entirely unsolicited advice, she says, slightly defensive.
Well, now you tell me.
Kidding, kidding. I appreciate the lecture, and I did ask for it.
Brad’s easy. He’s me, but with several tweakings — he’s taller, cuter, and nicer for starters. He’s also a lot goofier when it comes to women. I’ve never been a Lothario, but I was never Brad’s kinda lame, either. He’s my romantic side carried to an absurd degree.
Lori’s tougher, which is why I wrote this post. I like your idea of doing character interviews in my head. Never could understand how some folks could be so patient as to do that on paper.
I don’t think I’ve made any serious missteps thus far (or if I have, no one has called me on it yet), but as things get deeper, I suspect I may have more trouble.
thanks, Kate 😉
I’m with Darla, my assumption was that Lori didn’t believe Brad – or, doesn’t want to believe him. And she wouldn’t necessarily call him on it at that moment, since she’s trying to reaffirm her claim to him. She may get a little panicked later, when she’s alone, and reassuring Barb / herself that it’s just a fling.
As for the role reversal, I love it. My younger brother is a starry eyed romantic (and it’s worked for him, since he fell in love with the one at 15 and they’ve been happily married for ten years) and I am the more sex-driven one (love and forever may be great, but I’m not gonna put my life on hold ’til I find it). I think that the story is working so far, and the most important thing is to get the first draft done. You can fix anything and everything in revisions, but too many people second guess themselves midway through the first draft, and never end up finishing.
Um, not that I have strong feelings on the subject, or anything 😉
Renee
Yes, that’s usual … men give love for sex, women give sex for love … I should have said the movie was unusual in that it was devoid of sex but there was love.
(Brad’s the first one to use the L word) and it seems to me this should cause her no small amount of distress
This reminded me of an old stand up routine of Janeane Garofalo where she’s talking about that movie Chasing Amy. She talks about that scene where the guy tells the girl how he feels long before the girl’s anywhere near feeling the same. Janeane’s reaction was “I’d be so out of there if that happened to me” and I totally agreed with the sentiment. (Really wish I could remember the finer points of her argument, but anyway…) Thing is, in that kind of situation, it seems to me that this would cause the guy to lose some of those respect points he’d been building up with Lori. So she could go back to telling herself she doesn’t respect him, and that even though he’s diminished himself in front of her, power-wise, she can still get it on with him and not have to feel anything special towards him.
Of course this would mean there’d have to be something significant to finally turn the tide in the guy’s favor, make her have that epiphanal moment about what she thought of as weaknesses are strengths, etc. – but that’s for later in the story so you can worry about that another day :-).
Renee: I’ve been thinking about this all day and I’m not done thinking about it. For the moment, I disagree. I think she does believe him, or at least, she accepts that Brad believes he loves her. She’s messed up over the whole love thing, since the only other time she ever felt it or said it, the guy turned out to be such a dipshit. Now she’s not sure she knows what love is, and the fact she has ignored the problem for nearly ten years hasn’t helped matters.
Crystal, noxcat, that aphorism irks me, perhaps because it’s never been true for me — neither for me, nor the women in my life. I don’t see the truth in it.
fiveandfour — hey, how have you been? I’ve been a crappy blogsurfer and I haven’t been out to your place in a while. Anyway: I loved Chasing Amy, especially that scene. It felt true (if you’ll forgive me for talking like a ‘serious fiction writer’ for a moment).
I don’t think Lori would lose respect over the L word business. I think she’s a bit stunned by it, though.
yeah! what renee said, with bells on.
[…] I do have friends who think that university is just a place to find a husband. Doug’s met a woman like this before. And, to be fair, I wouldn’t mind, if the guy’s rich. LOL. […]
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