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Agents of Change and Stories About Everypeople
Obligatory Notice: The below is a Babble; it is not a scholarly treatise and ought not to be treated as such.
So, yesterday, Steve and I went out to breakfast -- accidentally, out to breakfast, the house power having knuckled under to the force of the wind on the overnight. And one of the things we talked about, over our coffee and other tasty things, was the vigilante hero in SF. Very often in genre, the motivator for the hero is A Death -- of a spouse, of a beloved sibling, a parent... Very often, it seems as if A Death is the only motivator. Looked at in the light of those folks who say (but do they really?) that they want stories about "Mrs. Brown" -- i.e., the "normal" (whatever that means) middle aged lady who lives downstairs, the problem of genre heroism becomes even trickier. What would motivate Mrs. Brown to cease her comfortable existence, leave her cozy apartment, her cats and her grandkids, and embrace heroism? Heroism is messy; it hurts; very often people -- at least, the person you were before -- fail to survive it. In fact, heroism is not ordinary, therefore a story about heroism is extraordinary.
Steve thought that maybe Getting Fed Up, or Witnessing an Injustice might impel someone into heroism. There's something there, though I wonder if such change-points would compel most genre readers. In the Liaden Universe(R), there is a character I think of as a hero because they refused the annihilation of worlds as their solution and took the longer, slower, non-violent course. Readers think this character is a wimp at best, and lost to honor at worst, because they're not doing anything. Kinda funny, that.
But, back to Mrs. Brown... 'way down the years, when I was a tall enough, if not exactly old enough, to read from the adult section of the public library, I fell into a series of books by an author whose name I no longer recall. Edited to Add: Mary Lasswell. The stories concerned three "normal" women -- Mrs. Feeney whose husband had died, leaving her the proprietor of a bar; Mrs. Rasmussen, also a widow, forced by penury to live with her slovenly daughter and abusive son-in-law; and Miss Tinkham, an unemployed piano teacher. All three ladies are long in the tooth and they form an alliance.
Mrs. Feeney sees Miss Tinkham going from door to door in the neighborhood, has pity on her and offers her the spare room in trade for playing piano at the bar. Mrs. Rasmussen, a long-time friend of Mrs. Feeney's gets fed up with her circumstances and also moves in with Mrs. Feeney. Mrs. Feeney recalls that she had always wanted to travel, so the three of them load up Mrs. Feeney's ancient station wagon and take off to have adventures. Wherever they land, they become Agents of Change, righting everyday wrongs, smoothing the path of Young Love, helping a Mexican woman in the country illegally to avoid the Border Patrol, gain a job and her green card...
Clearly, these were stories about Mrs. Brown and I enjoyed them thoroughly when I was thirteen, but they were written as comedies; nobody could take the antics of the three ladies seriously, after all. One wonders how they might play, written "seriously" -- or if they could even be written seriously; or if reader expectation insists that such stories must be comedy.
...and now, back to work
So, yesterday, Steve and I went out to breakfast -- accidentally, out to breakfast, the house power having knuckled under to the force of the wind on the overnight. And one of the things we talked about, over our coffee and other tasty things, was the vigilante hero in SF. Very often in genre, the motivator for the hero is A Death -- of a spouse, of a beloved sibling, a parent... Very often, it seems as if A Death is the only motivator. Looked at in the light of those folks who say (but do they really?) that they want stories about "Mrs. Brown" -- i.e., the "normal" (whatever that means) middle aged lady who lives downstairs, the problem of genre heroism becomes even trickier. What would motivate Mrs. Brown to cease her comfortable existence, leave her cozy apartment, her cats and her grandkids, and embrace heroism? Heroism is messy; it hurts; very often people -- at least, the person you were before -- fail to survive it. In fact, heroism is not ordinary, therefore a story about heroism is extraordinary.
Steve thought that maybe Getting Fed Up, or Witnessing an Injustice might impel someone into heroism. There's something there, though I wonder if such change-points would compel most genre readers. In the Liaden Universe(R), there is a character I think of as a hero because they refused the annihilation of worlds as their solution and took the longer, slower, non-violent course. Readers think this character is a wimp at best, and lost to honor at worst, because they're not doing anything. Kinda funny, that.
But, back to Mrs. Brown... 'way down the years, when I was a tall enough, if not exactly old enough, to read from the adult section of the public library, I fell into a series of books by an author whose name I no longer recall. Edited to Add: Mary Lasswell. The stories concerned three "normal" women -- Mrs. Feeney whose husband had died, leaving her the proprietor of a bar; Mrs. Rasmussen, also a widow, forced by penury to live with her slovenly daughter and abusive son-in-law; and Miss Tinkham, an unemployed piano teacher. All three ladies are long in the tooth and they form an alliance.
Mrs. Feeney sees Miss Tinkham going from door to door in the neighborhood, has pity on her and offers her the spare room in trade for playing piano at the bar. Mrs. Rasmussen, a long-time friend of Mrs. Feeney's gets fed up with her circumstances and also moves in with Mrs. Feeney. Mrs. Feeney recalls that she had always wanted to travel, so the three of them load up Mrs. Feeney's ancient station wagon and take off to have adventures. Wherever they land, they become Agents of Change, righting everyday wrongs, smoothing the path of Young Love, helping a Mexican woman in the country illegally to avoid the Border Patrol, gain a job and her green card...
Clearly, these were stories about Mrs. Brown and I enjoyed them thoroughly when I was thirteen, but they were written as comedies; nobody could take the antics of the three ladies seriously, after all. One wonders how they might play, written "seriously" -- or if they could even be written seriously; or if reader expectation insists that such stories must be comedy.
...and now, back to work
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