Thoughts on heroines
Well, the title is a bit misleading, it's just my mumble/ramble on my own my characters. I've got several different stories running around in my head practically all the time, and they are mostly fanfiction. (I consider premade sims stories a type of fanfiction.) Some I've published at fanfiction.net, some I've put up here, others, just on my own
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You do not have to show these things to anybody until you are satisfied with them. You do not have to meet anybody else's criteria as long as you are true to yourself and your own standards. Other people's criteria and comments are tools you can use, where applicable, when you know your story isn't good enough yet and you're trying to figure out what your weak link is. You no more need to apply every tool on every work than you'd have to use every implement in the toolbox when building a set of shelves. Get out the saws and planes, nails and screws, hammers and screwdrivers you need, put the rest back, and build the shelves you want to hold the load you need to put on them.
Listen to your characters. Trust them. They don't have to fulfill every feminist goal in one fell swoop. That's too much to load onto a real person, let alone an imaginary one! They only have to be who they are. Figure out what the story is, and tell that story, cutting out everything that doesn't tell that story.
If first person writing is what's comfortable for you and enables you to understand a character best, use it! You can experiment with third person and the various degrees of omniscience later, when you're more comfortable with character creation.
Believe it or not, not every story needs a character arc! Miss Jane Marple is Miss Jane Marple in every book. Her stories were puzzle mysteries and character arcs would have disrupted the elegance of the form. Character arcs can also be subtle, slipped in so that the reader is barely aware of them. Literary virtues are many; they don't have to all be crammed into every work.
You have strengths. Discover them. Learn to rely on them. They'll give you the safe space you need to work on your weaknesses. And you'll always have weaknesses, and they needn't keep you from doing good work. Isaac Asimov couldn't write distinctive dialog; Shakespeare's plots are sprawling and frequently absurd; JK Rowling has adverbitis something awful. Those weaknesses don't spoil their work or prevent them from being read with pleasure or even being great. Your weaknesses won't stop you, either.
And that voice in your head nitpicking you? That's the Devil. That's the very thing all those feminist criticisms are trying to kill, the Voice of Disempowerment. You'll never kill yours, not completely. But you can build a closet in your head, shove the Devil into it, lock the door, and tell it to STFU.
Finish a story. Any story. Put it away, and finish another one. When you have that one finished, you can look at the first one, and what you learned by finishing those stories (not the least important thing of which will be, that you can finish a story!) will help you see how to improve the first one. Not every story will survive, but that's life. You will learn from all of them. If you let yourself.
If you need permission, here. Have a permission.
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