Toughening up

The biggest insult about my writing I've received came from a certain celebrity children's editor I met at a writers' conference.  He rudely told me that my writing was "rather gentle, a bit like the old fashioned stories".  The scene I gave him to read has a native girl being marched to a pool by her brutal father for a ritual washing before her forced marriage, so naturally I didn't agree with him.

I was reminded of this when re-working a story yesterday. The story is about the fall-out that rape causes, and as I read It through I realised my main character didn't show enough passion and anger.  She was dealing with the issue through a sort of world-weariness.  It also didn't help that I'd set the action on a remote island with an idyllic pastoral scene where not a lot happened. I was pulling my punches, big time.

I've decided to tackle the subject head-on in my rewrite.  My heroine is going to be a woman who was raped and failed by the justice system, an all too common occurrence.  But this time she's going to be strong, passionate, and deal with the rapists the courts don't.

She's a sculptor, and her sculptures show women in poses of torment and anger, the fall-out from being raped and ignored.  But as it's a science fiction story there's a twist about the nature of the sculptures too.  My new heroine is a streetwise business woman on a mission.

This still leaves the question of how much violence to show.  I personally don't like graphic violence and I won't put it out into the world, but in this case the violence to a rapist will be justified.  I guess I'll  have to write the first draft and decide whether I can live with what I've written.

The story is now going to be told from a first person present tense viewpoint, a very contemporary storytelling form.  I think that all these changes will toughen up the story and make it into something with heart that lives.