Fandom: Maddening Howl
From the Greenwillow Blog, a comment from the late Diana Wynne Jones on reader response to one of her, uh, best-loved characters:The one big, strange fact about Howl is that almost every young woman who reads about him wants to marry him. They began wanting to before the book was even published and they all confess their wish quite openly. Yesterday I was doing a question-and-answer session in a London theatre and a teenage girl put her hand up and said -- without any embarrassment at all -- that she had long wanted to marry Howl and would I mind. I wondered whether to ask her if she would mind everywhere being covered with green slime when Howl’s hair went wrong; or if she minded coping with a man who had head colds like a drama queen; or being twisted round Howl’s little finger; or would it worry her that the man was a terrible coward; or always falling in love with other women; or ... But I could see she regarded these facts as a challenge. So I sat with my mouth open for a second and then told her that she had now joined the end of a very long line that stretches at least once around the world.
This didn’t appear to trouble her unduly.
Paging Cleolinda Jones for a psychological consult! (Actually, I'd love to read a Cleolinda Jones review of Howl's Moving Castle for all kinds of reasons, not just this one.) But this quotation piqued my interest because (in addition to being amusing) it ties in to an issue I'm trying to work out in my massive effort of discipline: one of my characters is a card-carrying Bad Boy, a heartless trickster whose moral compass always points to SELF but who, in the closing moments of canon, gets blindsided by some embryonic "feelings" for the Heroine that lead him to hurl himself between her and danger and disappear, apparently for good. (Ha. Like that ever works.) Now, I like redemption plots, but I'm not going to be writing one here. The Bad Boy has a history of jerking the Heroine and her friends around and he's going to keep right on doing so, albeit under some protest this time. (He and the Big Bad don't get along.) The Heroine knows that the crush she's got on him was largely nurtured under false pretenses and she's going to go on telling him to go to hell when he hurts her or any of her peeps. But ... I want to leave room for that redemption plot in the future. And ... oh, dagnabit, I have to admit it: I also want to leave room for the "feelings" on both sides to develop into a romance after a metric tonne of maturation takes place. (Mostly because I have this absolutely glorious end-of-series climactic plot solution that involves a reluctant heroic sacrifice from the Bad Boy and a pithy Shut Up, Hannibal from the Heroine to the Big Bad when he tries to talk her out of enabling it. Ha!) So, unfortunately, I can't end this story with the Heroine telling the Bad Boy to get out of her life forever, but I want her to come across as conflicted about leaving him an opening, not wimpy. I also want him to come across as attractive but insufferable, not cute, and a romantic relationship between them as a really, really bad idea right now. Cue lots and lots of mental rewrites of their scenes together before I'm anywhere near those parts of the plot on paper. In short, characterization is HARD.
Phew. It's nice to have that off my chest. :-)
This didn’t appear to trouble her unduly.
Paging Cleolinda Jones for a psychological consult! (Actually, I'd love to read a Cleolinda Jones review of Howl's Moving Castle for all kinds of reasons, not just this one.) But this quotation piqued my interest because (in addition to being amusing) it ties in to an issue I'm trying to work out in my massive effort of discipline: one of my characters is a card-carrying Bad Boy, a heartless trickster whose moral compass always points to SELF but who, in the closing moments of canon, gets blindsided by some embryonic "feelings" for the Heroine that lead him to hurl himself between her and danger and disappear, apparently for good. (Ha. Like that ever works.) Now, I like redemption plots, but I'm not going to be writing one here. The Bad Boy has a history of jerking the Heroine and her friends around and he's going to keep right on doing so, albeit under some protest this time. (He and the Big Bad don't get along.) The Heroine knows that the crush she's got on him was largely nurtured under false pretenses and she's going to go on telling him to go to hell when he hurts her or any of her peeps. But ... I want to leave room for that redemption plot in the future. And ... oh, dagnabit, I have to admit it: I also want to leave room for the "feelings" on both sides to develop into a romance after a metric tonne of maturation takes place. (Mostly because I have this absolutely glorious end-of-series climactic plot solution that involves a reluctant heroic sacrifice from the Bad Boy and a pithy Shut Up, Hannibal from the Heroine to the Big Bad when he tries to talk her out of enabling it. Ha!) So, unfortunately, I can't end this story with the Heroine telling the Bad Boy to get out of her life forever, but I want her to come across as conflicted about leaving him an opening, not wimpy. I also want him to come across as attractive but insufferable, not cute, and a romantic relationship between them as a really, really bad idea right now. Cue lots and lots of mental rewrites of their scenes together before I'm anywhere near those parts of the plot on paper. In short, characterization is HARD.
Phew. It's nice to have that off my chest. :-)