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Nowadays people mostly mean protagonist villain when they say antihero, but I think the term was originally coined to mean the kind of protagonist I seem to mostly write about -- heroes without heroic qualities. The editor at Baen kindly suggested I might want to "recast" Esperanza Highway so as to transform Chuy into an action hero. I don't actually think he meant me to take the suggestion literally: he seemed to be an intelligent person who would have noticed that "recasting" in this case would have been "writing a different book." -- which is what I think he was really suggesting, only being gentle about it.
Okay, here's the manifesto part:
Action heroes are not the only interesting protagonists in the world, even in genre fiction.
As a manifesto goes, that's pretty mild, isn't it? But that's the mild thing I want to say. I think my guys are interesting. I think the guy at Baen thought Chuy was interesting too, and that's why he thought I might want to write a different book about him. -- though I'm afraid that the major contenders for "different book" about Chuy are either grim, or dark comedies, and we all know I'm too much of a wimp to write something altogether grim (my brother remarked how sunny my brooding vampire story was), and I don't have enough of a sense of humor to write a dark comedy.
But enough of my shortcomings. The thing I want to say is on a different plane altogether. The interesting thing about my passive characters is not that they're passive, but that they are both passive and active. They're stymied by circumstance and their own personalities, but they do try. And they win, not the fate of the universe, but their own souls, and something to do with the world. Chuy saves another man's life (after that man tries to kill him, I might add), and he gets the boy (mostly by not trying to get him). My refugee wins by living at all, and by managing to be a husband and father and a union member at all. Terry in the vampire story wins by finding that place where you can give yourself but still keep yourself. And my guy in this current piece wins by being enough of a mensch that Araceli makes the one wish that frees him. No, she doesn't cut off his hands and feet like in the fairy tale, but she does remove his one real power, which is of no use to him.
So these are kind of like "The Goose Girl," in which the heroine gives up everything and goes completely abject to achieve her happy ending, but I hope less icky. I suppose I shouldn't worry about icky. Icky is a special case of my Rule: "all other things being equal, the weirder the story, the better." The truism that's based on, naturally, is: "unless something untoward happens, there is no story."
And I think there's a reason these are men, and it's not because I'm not enough of a feminist to write women protagonists. On the contrary, I think it's because at this stage in our cultural history it's more problematic to look at the kind of stymiedness I'm interested in, when it's embodied in a female character: that the cultural, political, and economic reasons for a woman to be stymied would overwhelm the story I'm interested in. When I write about these guys, it's mostly men's relationships with other men that enter into it, and the relationships are usually all about friendship, not about lovers (even when they are lovers, it's friendship that's the character of the relationship I'm interested in), not employers, not members of a hierarchical organization -- even when such a thing exists. And I think the reason this is interesting for me to write about is that it pares things down, so that I can concentrate on the things that are interesting to me, and I can allow those things to get as complicated as they want to.
I think I'm on to something, and I think it's only that I have too much in common with my characters that these are not already highly popular and controversial items.
Okay, here's the manifesto part:
Action heroes are not the only interesting protagonists in the world, even in genre fiction.
As a manifesto goes, that's pretty mild, isn't it? But that's the mild thing I want to say. I think my guys are interesting. I think the guy at Baen thought Chuy was interesting too, and that's why he thought I might want to write a different book about him. -- though I'm afraid that the major contenders for "different book" about Chuy are either grim, or dark comedies, and we all know I'm too much of a wimp to write something altogether grim (my brother remarked how sunny my brooding vampire story was), and I don't have enough of a sense of humor to write a dark comedy.
But enough of my shortcomings. The thing I want to say is on a different plane altogether. The interesting thing about my passive characters is not that they're passive, but that they are both passive and active. They're stymied by circumstance and their own personalities, but they do try. And they win, not the fate of the universe, but their own souls, and something to do with the world. Chuy saves another man's life (after that man tries to kill him, I might add), and he gets the boy (mostly by not trying to get him). My refugee wins by living at all, and by managing to be a husband and father and a union member at all. Terry in the vampire story wins by finding that place where you can give yourself but still keep yourself. And my guy in this current piece wins by being enough of a mensch that Araceli makes the one wish that frees him. No, she doesn't cut off his hands and feet like in the fairy tale, but she does remove his one real power, which is of no use to him.
So these are kind of like "The Goose Girl," in which the heroine gives up everything and goes completely abject to achieve her happy ending, but I hope less icky. I suppose I shouldn't worry about icky. Icky is a special case of my Rule: "all other things being equal, the weirder the story, the better." The truism that's based on, naturally, is: "unless something untoward happens, there is no story."
And I think there's a reason these are men, and it's not because I'm not enough of a feminist to write women protagonists. On the contrary, I think it's because at this stage in our cultural history it's more problematic to look at the kind of stymiedness I'm interested in, when it's embodied in a female character: that the cultural, political, and economic reasons for a woman to be stymied would overwhelm the story I'm interested in. When I write about these guys, it's mostly men's relationships with other men that enter into it, and the relationships are usually all about friendship, not about lovers (even when they are lovers, it's friendship that's the character of the relationship I'm interested in), not employers, not members of a hierarchical organization -- even when such a thing exists. And I think the reason this is interesting for me to write about is that it pares things down, so that I can concentrate on the things that are interesting to me, and I can allow those things to get as complicated as they want to.
I think I'm on to something, and I think it's only that I have too much in common with my characters that these are not already highly popular and controversial items.
