Hidden Heart

It's amazing how easy the act of revision comes now. "Revise" used to be the most difficult part of the work. It never went anywhere.

This story I wrote almost two years ago has been evading me. Today I captured it's hidden heart. Or at least a ventricle, perhaps an aorta. But I would guess that about 75% of the story was a narcissistic celebration of youthful whining. The 25% that wasn't all about me showed enormous potential. And yet again the character with whom the heart of the story lies is a woman.

In many of the stories I write the focal character is female. I set this as a personal challenge a long time ago, to write a female perspective. I did, and then I wrote more. They keep coming back. They are more interesting than just about every male character I've written (a juvenile bunch of ne'er-do-wells, with the occasional highly isolated neurotic thrown in). The female characters have more personality too. They are more complex, more complicated, more vulnerable to every possible extreme I can imagine. They are also more resiliant. They seem in many ways more human. I wonder why this is. (No reason for me to think too much about it, or I'll just end up confusing myself.)

Perhaps through them I can say all the things that I cannot say through male characters. I don't know. This requires more process.