Hey all! I was travelling a lot this past week, so great thanks go to Rachel, who picked up the ball and began the discussion about Strong Heroines! I wanted to add to Rachel’s thoughts to give you all some building blocks.

A heroine should be a like a phoenix…enduring and beautiful, and able to rise from the ashes of her own crumbling world to start again. Such a heroine has two Unquenchable Qualities that make her heroic. This week, we’re talking about the First: Confidence!

When you’re building confidence into a heroine (and a hero!), you must have something she does well, something she can rely on about herself, even in the darkest moment. In my plotting for the Heart/Soul/Mind class, I refer to this as their “competence.” Something she can “fall back on.” If you know what this is, you can use it to build a black moment, and even affect character change.

What do I mean? Let’s take my Expect the Sunrise gal, Andee McLeod. She is a bush pilot and an SAR extraordinaire. When her plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness, she has to depend on her skills to get them out of the woods. Her confidence in her skills eventually wins over the others. However, I also want to break Andee, to bring her to her darkest moment, so I’m going to chip away at her confidence until she finally is forced to turn even that over to the Lord.

Ie, as they trek out of the wilderness, despite her abilities, they get deeper into trouble, and Andee realizes she’s in way over her head. She has to surrender her area of greatest confidence…and only then will she discover that God cares for her more than she has imagined.

So – I start the book by building her skills….and then, I slowly start chipping away at them.

Let’s apply this building/chipping technique to some of the great examples:

Emily lost her mom at 15, has a dad that will barely speak to her and she has no idea why but she loves him anyway. She lives with and cares for her great aunt, who she diligently nursed back to health after a stroke. She loves kids, is a primary teacher in a very small town Christian school. She is gentle, caring and very gracious to everyone, including her dad, who she visits out of a desire to honor him as the Lord would have her do. She would deny herself if it meant preventing someone else from injury, would be mortified at the thought of causing someone else to suffer.

Okay, so Emily’s confidence is found in the second sentence: Who she diligently nursed back to health…. Emily finds strength and confidence in her ability to care for others. So, a good way for the author to chip away at her confidence would be to have those people she’s taking care of either reject her care, or get worse. She’ll have to step aside and let God take care of them….

Here’s another:

Danielle is confident in herself because she know’s who she is. Flaws and all. And she accepts herself. She may not like it all, but she is okay with it. Her confidence was tested seven years ago when she became ill with a long term illness…Seven years later, Her confidence in all she knows and who she is tested once again when she is brutally raped by someone she knows. And is continued to be tested as other threats to her arise. Throughout the story she is reminded of how strong she is. That she can get through anything with God on her side.

It seems to me that Danielle’s confidence comes in her ability to survive. She prides herself in picking herself back up. So, what if the author chips away at this survival instinct by having her exhibit PTSD, until it causes her to realize that no, she can’t survive without letting the Lord heal her. (And to emphasize this, you could have it be something in particular that she refuses to let go of, or even confront.). Another take on this is giving her a profession that she dives into…but as the memories haunt her, her professional skills take hits, until she realizes she has to confront those memories in order to be the person she wants to be. We’ll still applaud her strength, but now she becomes flesh and blood, and less “indestructible survivor.”

Here’s the last one:

My heroine’s name is Izumi. Her husband dies but she still has to be able to get her late husband’s affairs in order afterwards. She also has to be confident enough to take on the rest of the family, since the house belonged to her husband’s family. Should she fight to keep the house or give it back to the family? Giving it back could mean a renewed interest in Mafia activities for the family, since the house was given to her husband by his grandmother who was tired of Mafia politics.

I am wondering if Izumi’s confidence is in her relationship pwith her husband. It seems that it would be a great story if they had a solid marriage…until he died and she uncovered lots of interesting (and even confusing, perhaps dark) secrets that shake her ability to stand up to his family. (I’m thinking she would stand up to them because that’s what her huband would want her to do….and the family he wanted them to have…but now, with the secrets, it’s chipping away at her confidence in “them” and everything they built.) That’s one angle approach as you build/chip away at their confidence.

Having confidence is SO important for a heroine, because essentially it’s the reason the hero is attracted to her (I’m sorry, but they’re not really attracted to damsels in distress – as least today’s hero isn’t. He wants a woman who can stand beside him, and look good doing it!) Not only that, but as an author, you can use it against her, to build a delicious dark moment that will shake her to her core, and cause her to be more than she ever dreamed she could be.

Okay – next week, we’re going to talk about the other Unquenchable Quality of a Strong Heroine! If you have questions about your heroine and how to build or destroy her confidence (that’s what we do best here at Book Therapy, he he he), hop on over to Voices. I’ll be hanging around all weekend to chat!

Thank you to Camille, Jean and Jessica for their great examples!