Developing Strong Female Characters
As I write and develop characters, I often wonder how to create personalities that are true to themselves, realistic and believable. I strive to to develop powerful female characters that reflect the lives we lead. As a child of the 70s and the daughter of a powerful, loving and successful woman I have been part of a generation of women who has had to examine and evaluate what “powerful and successful” means.
For my first novel, Las Hechizadas, I began by writing character sketches based on women I already knew. I drew from my experiences and interactions with my friends and the women in my family. In my lifetime I have been blessed with valuable, deep friendships with women who have fought and survived. They have overcome economic hardships, illness, death and divorce. Through it all they come out smiling and fighting and stronger. Sharing life experiences with these women helped me weave their stories and their struggles into the characters in my book. These women shared with me their deep emotional, psychological and spiritual needs. I took these characteristics and interlaced them with my own imagination to come up with a cast of women who could handle anything I threw their way.
I knew that the protagonists had to be women who understood their own journey and maintained focus in trying to achieve their goals. I brought in the power of Mother Nature to exude the teachings for the women. They are both recipients of her knowledge and skill and serve as teachers. It is the teaching and the care giving that makes these women who they are. Their wisdom makes them stable and balanced. Their willingness to risk and lose everything makes them strong and resilient. Their ability to connect with family and community makes them authentic.
Las Hechizadas are women who follow their hearts, and their paths with a quiet fervor, because they know that understanding human life and each of our struggles is what is important to the flourishing of their own community. It isn’t about men vs. women or good vs. evil, but about an internal power that spreads love. These women embrace La Pachamama, or the interwoven relationship with the Earth. Pachamama is the Goddess of fertility, of planting and harvesting. She embodies the creative life sustaining powers on Earth and when she suffers so do we. It is with this in mind that I developed this group of women who could be emissaries for the idea that there is equilibrium between nature and human beings that must be maintained for us all to survive.
There is an eternal struggle about the definition of a feminist, yet my view is such that women should be who they are and guide themselves with their hearts and minds. We do not have to be bound by societal norms if we don’t want to, but neither should we be judged if we choose more traditional roles. We have a plethora of gifts to offer to the world and none of them should be oppressed. It is in these gifts that we create diversity and life. We have the power and ability to do whatever we want, be whomever we want and model for those young women to come that the feminine within has a strength not seen in others.
It is from this perspective that I wrote the female characters in my book. None of them are weak, although they show moments of weakness. In these moments of weakness other women in their families or communities sustain them. This support system is what rejuvenates their strength and allows them to move forward.
While there is violence and gender power struggles in the story, my hope is that the intelligence and passion the women feel about peace and instilling curative powers in their community outweighs the negative, tiresome politics that invade the lives of the other characters. I try to show the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine, between nature and ambition. The women in the story serve as a conduit to a bigger picture, which is that without balance we cannot exist.
