Friday, January 20, 2012

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

First, I want to apologize for not being able to hop around and return your lovely comments this week - my internet was all sorts of wonky and it refused to allow it.

Having said that, I want to talk about douchebags. Again. Because some of you may remember my Take The Anti-Douchebag Challenge post, where I ranted and raved about the epidemic of douchebag male mc's in YA literature. And after all that, do you know what I did in my own YA novel?

Yup. I went and wrote a douchebag.



I didn't do it on purpose. Apparently, I have this bad habit of being biased toward The Boy Who Gets The Girl in my stories. And The Other Boy? Gets totally crapped on as a result.

I feel like I need to make the reader side with me, side with my choice of Happy Ending. But then I wind up... not giving them one. Oops.

As much as I love my poor Other Boy, he's received three votes of douchebag from my Betas so far (even after the CH 3 revisions Leigh Ann - hold me). So back I go to my revision cave in attempt to make him as lovable (but flawed) as I originally intended.

Has this ever happened to you, peeps? Have you ever written the very thing you claim to hate?

4 comments:

  1. EVEN AFTER THE REVISIONS??? *jaw drops* I mean, yeah, he's still a jerk, but at least I didn't want to torch him with fire. Let's talk.

    Remember that time I said I wanted to only write smart female characters and then I went and invented the protag of my first novel? Yeah. She was dumb as a bag of rocks. (She did get a little smarter thanks to you and the rest of Team TT.) So, I've been there, inserting two feet.

    You're doing an awesome job. And seriously. Let's talk.

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  2. Oh oh! Raises hand.

    I think my first heroine existed solely just to get tied to a pair of train tracks. She's been upgraded to "doormat", but I still need to make her into the strong heroine I would approve of.

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  3. Haha, it happens to the best of us. I tried so very hard to make one boy not a douchebag, but it took some work. Lovable but flawed sounds much better to me! Good luck!

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  4. Yes, it happens. My first protagonist was the perfect, pretty, intelligent girl. I think she was all I hoped to be when I was a little girl. Once I was able to accept what others were telling me about her I changed the character and the story was not so bad. It was one of my NaNo stories that I never got around to editing. As long as you recognize what your beta readers are telling you then you are on the right path. Good luck.

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