How my Heroine and I Learnt Love from Writing
Thoughts through the eyes of Me and Mine
“Who had their luck run out this time?”
I had never realised the extent of my hate for that question until someone asked me again.
It is true that the pieces I write lie on the margins of the morbid.
But in this arena where I exist, where there is even a fringe of light, my heroine has a shadow, and there are shadows of shadows.
I could tell you about the ill-fated incident that made me find my muse in the murk of the night. I could tempt you with a story of a miraculous person who informed me that I would be a writer of legend.
Neither of those lines would be true.
I started to write in my pre-teen years, a result of nagging by my mother to ‘put pen on paper’. Until a few years ago, I did not realise how appreciative I am of that effort as if I wasn’t already deeply in her debt.
“Why does your story talk about this troubling idea?”
This was one of those many questions I had no answer to as a child.
I’d been bursting at the seams with Enid Blyton and slinking behind like Chet Morton on wheels while remaining carefully neutral about Nancy Drew lest I incur the wrath of some of her more fanatical followers.
What I did not understand then was why what I wrote was not what I should’ve written.
Should I have written about rainbows shooting out of unicorns? Or should the piece have been about flowers and butterflies in tandem?
Why was being afraid of walking in the dark not good enough when the books I read talked about adventures?
I admit I didn’t have the guts to add to the gore then. So my heroine walked out of the swamp, bile in her throat and carefully alive.
I latched onto Hermione Granger like a drowning girl next. She had been dropped into a situation she wanted to succeed in too, with no idea of the waters she was navigating.
Harry Potter fan fiction soon became my new home as a teen. Hermione and Bellatrix Lestrange replaced the Hardy brothers in an uncomfortable imitation of the duo.
“Do you not believe in love? Is that why your heroines are out for blood?”
The words cut like always as if a sabre swung full force into me. I do not mean to make a mountain of a molehill, but that was what started it.
I had nothing against the supposed tender emotion of love before, but I decided then, in a bout of stupidity, that if love meant only hope and happiness, and my heroine couldn’t fight for what she believed in, I wanted no part of ‘love’.
With only a belt and a rock, I wanted my heroine to singlehandedly defend an entire kingdom from an army of rodents. I wanted to hurl stones at cockroaches with deadly accuracy.
I wanted my heroine to be the one with the answers; I wanted to ask the questions for once.
I’d say I got bribed into reading a whole bunch of classics right after.
Anyway, I spent high school poring through Dickens and the such. Between the self-consciousness of Rebecca and the thirst of BenHur, I unwittingly fell in love for the first time. Knowing what I knew then, I was extremely unwilling to acknowledge it.
“Your ‘strong’ heroine isn’t supposed to need love. Isn’t she enough by herself?”
While I wouldn’t describe myself as particularly affected by whispered remarks or cutting arguments, this, dear god, tore me to shreds in a matter of minutes. I felt the prickling of tears behind my eyes before it began, waiting to break into me, to destroy defences and lay siege to new walls.
I’d looked forward to stepping into the world without my armour on, to be Lucy from Narnia and feel the edges as I went along.
Obviously, I needed to be told that strength meant that my heroine could only flirt on the rim of intimacy so she could escape from its weakness.
Strong is detachment, I told myself. Strong is never being able to get society right; it is being criticised for being in love and for not.
“Is there something you want to tell me? Something I should know?”
Anxiety wasn’t the only thing plaguing my heroine when I started college; depression called her into her shell more often than not. She often thought about the ink.
I thought about rain dripping on the handwritten sheet. My heroine saw the ink spread out, losing its crispness. The unpleasantness lingered, but she saw hidden colours emerge now and then. I discovered the shades of pink in the black; she saw the green leak off the edge to pool on the table.
Surprisingly enough, I heard myself tell her she should know that the colours need the right drops to resurface.
The challenge intrigued me, so my next piece started with my heroine suppressing her fears to say the three magic words.
I love you.
Just let me die.
It was through no fault of mine that the story ended with this line. But I heard enough jests in my honour to start to believe it was my shortcomings that led to this conclusion.
“Why do you kill off all your characters?”
“You’re a dark, dark writer.”
“Where’s the light to this darkness?”
My heroine hadn’t wanted to be a part of the light spectrum, so she had surrendered to the darkness.
Even this surrender did not bring much respite, though my naivety expected it at the time. It was in these blurbs of time that the ugly vein of insecurity rose to the surface, so very willing to burst through the skin, to spill across for everyone to see.
A high frequency of disappointment makes you immune to the shock of it though. I don’t mean to say the question ever stops hurting, but that’s what my heroine and I do for us, and I’m okay with it.
So when I recently graduated from college, struggling to complete the novel my heroine has been a part of for so long,
I took a decision.
I don’t want to write a strong female character. I want my heroine to learn to be strong.
I want her to cry; I want her to laugh.
I want her to be compassionate; I want her to be diabolical when it matters.
I want her to blaze with glory on the battlefield; I want her to be trampled on down in the arena.
I want her to be herself in her entirety; I want her to feel the tendrils of love wrap around her heart and set her rules of perception.
I don’t want her to be a lonely tough shell that can never be broken though. It’s just that I want to set her limits farther than most, in the distance where only she and I can see them.
I want that the world calls her ‘strong’; I want her to be ‘right’.
I want her to love.
Kinnera Priya Putti exists. She just graduated, so she identifies as an adult in strictly technical terms. On weekdays and weekends, she writes and codes.
She uses her savings habit to hoard both logic and creativity, using them rarely and never together. If you mention HP or SPN to her, among other fandoms you may accidentally trigger, you will never leave.
If you still want to risk it, she’s on Twitter@kinnerapriyap.
