Suppose you have a beta reader. (In my experience, all beta readers are invaluable. Some throw you straight fastballs, some curveballs, some changeups or sliders, some sweepers or screwballs. Doesn’t matter. They’re all priceless in their own way.) In this case, a reader who absorbs your latest tome and opines about the novel’s main female character: “I was torn about her true motivations and about my reaction to those motivations. On one side you might see her that way. That dangerous-girl-on-the-hunt way. That femme fatale way. But there was a whole other side, I think to an even greater degree, that revealed something entirely different. Something I couldn’t explain to myself, and still can’t. So I have to say a part of me doesn’t trust her, at least a little part. But I think if I knew her in life, especially with her dizzying array of contradictions and her self-destructive vulnerable nature, the larger part of me would trust her very much, and perhaps want to even give her a loving BFF slap, before it was too late. Sorry to be so wishy-washy and confusing about all this, but that’s how this person (character, I should say) struck me.”
Well now, that’s certainly a bite of feedback one should chew on before swallowing. And femme fatale? To be honest, I knew in general the 1940s-detective-gunmoll label she was referring, but had to google it a bit for overall particulars and deeper definitions of color and meaning. And in general I knew a femme fatale could be seen as a archetype or character trope, whether you were referring to such a seductive siren in art or cinema or literature or time-buried mythology or the girl next door, with her fresh, rain-washed face and God-given Maybelline lips, that runs off with her high school, senior-year geography teacher before a single soul about them ever catches wind. Regardless, what I found interesting about this was my own knowledge of how, as an author, my characters come to their fruition in my mind or on the page or screen before me. And the one thing I can say is that the ideas of types or tropes never come into that mind anytime during that process. That is, I never start with a particular character trait or role or whatever to be played out and built upon during that creative process. In fact, I usually start with that person or character coming to me, not me to them, oftentimes before I even have a story to put them in. Then watching them take their full shape and personality sometimes quite quickly, or at least as the narrative progresses.
Then again, maybe I do. Do the trope and archetype thing, I mean. Maybe during that process my subconscious is busily reaching back into the untraceable, albeit mindful mists of time, pulling traits and tropes out of a top hat like some secondhand carny magician. After all, many the wiser critic has written there are no new story plots, no new character types. In the backlog of creation, starting with God Himself, every plot, every narrative, every smiling or frowning or laughing or crying countenance attached to its bag of “unique” characteristics, has already happened. Has already been done. Or as my Mississippi-farmer great-uncle John used to say: “That field’s already been plowed a mite. All I can do is plow it again and hope something grows.”
But, for me, the truth is I don’t care either way. Life is too short and complicated to sweat such unknowable details of origination. What I do know is when Nikolina von Lotzenburg, a.k.a. Nikki Lotz (the character my beta reader was referring), suddenly appeared before me, or within my writer’s mind, the last thing on my mind, or accompanying her seventeen-year-old fully fleshed figure and personality, was a well-used trope or dependable archetype. As it was, that appearance first took place a few years before as a short-story character. One of many, passing through the word-mill, before I moved on to other things, done with all that…Right. As it didn’t take her long to begin coming annoyingly back to me–bleeding upward through my subconscious brain cells?–making her demands. The only character of mine, in such a manner, I can recall doing so: “Ami, there you are again. And only one little snippet of story for me? You should know I need my own space, my own–how do you say?–so-called novel, to move about as I will and want. And don’t be cheap about it. Buy me enough words to do all I have to do. Alles klar?”
I guess, in the end, I should be grateful that when I came to write Soldier in Germany, introducing my possible femme fatale, I hadn’t yet read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, with its colorfully disturbing impressions of sharp-fanged vaginas, phallic detachments, and metaphorical red-gashes galore, as God only knows where the story might have gone. Still, as Paglia and others have in various ways alluded, the point is to move beyond the common ordinary anything, be it trope or archetype, and make it artfully new–the essence and overall effects of it–as no one else but you are able. As I think the point here is, even though there are already the well-established plot-types and character-types, there is only one you-type. One voice where, if you work very hard and love doing so, something special and unique may come as a result. Where even a femme-fatale may reveal the complexities of the human psyche, beyond type, beyond fiction, even.
But, of course, with complexity comes danger. When the unknowing joy of creation threatens to get out of hand at any moment. When you witness your own creation seeking out the serpent you never knew was lurking in the grass. As when Eve–the proto of that potentially deadly type–first appeared before Adam in their innocuous-seeming garden. Or when my ingenue-seeming girl first appeared before me, the warning-thought should have flashed: Girl next door or deadly vixen? As even as she rolled out onto the page, I somehow remained as conflicted as my beta reader, as my very own character looked straight into my eyes and said: “I know what you’re trying to do with this, with me, dredging me up so from your little basket of tricks, from all those silly notes you’ve been scribbling down. But that’s not what this is about. What I’m about. As I know you even more, even better, than you can ever imagine knowing me.”
What can you do with someone like that? As you feel yourself in a speeding car, on a midnight road, with sometimes yourself behind the steering wheel, and sometimes find yourself the passenger, with this willful unknown taking you in directions until the journey’s end, you have no idea. So you just hang on, as she goes careening onward into her own fictive destiny, breaking all your rules of the road as she does so, and making them (one can only imagine) anew as only she is able.