Last week was senior projects day, the day when all Pacific seniors present their thesis projects/studies in fifteen minutes to the rest of campus, and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about my own impending thesis. Granted, it’s two years away, hence the “overachiever” title, but this is what I do with my time. Worry about not having enough of it in the future. But I bet you’re wondering about the second part of the title of this blog post, seeing as it’s arguably the more interesting section. I’m getting to that.
So for creative writing majors, from what I understand, a big part of your thesis is drawing from a particular theme, author, book, or structure (multiple POVs, diary format, etc) and then doing your version. A friend of mine (who will be a senior next year) is doing a multiple “POV” (point of view) novel, meaning that she’s going to write the book with multiple perspectives/narrators. She is using a book she’s read as her inspiration, citing its fantastic plot but less-than-stellar characterization in between POVs. For her own novel, she wants to focus on not only crafting a good story, but also being able to differentiate between characters simply from their voice and not the name at the beginning of the chapter.
This got me thinking. There are a lot of ways I could go with my thesis- I could revamp Eugenia or even Dawned and examine dystopia in contemporary YA fiction, I could polish at least one of (probably Addicted) my UMA spy trilogy and build off of the rather disappointing girl spy books I’ve read before, or I could use Maureen Johnson or John Green as inspiration to finally write a real world YA book that doesn’t involve car chases, corrupt governments, or graphic death scenes. I still might use one of those ideas, especially because the first two mean I just have to edit rather than start from scratch. But then I started thinking about it more, and what I would really like to do is write something new, and what I would really like to write would center around…
…a psychopath. A young, female psychopath, to be more specific. Probably still set in a more dystopian universe, but centered around a deeply crazy and unstable character.
It’s no secret that I love psychopath characters almost as a rule. Sylar? I was unhealthily obsessed with him for about six months. Just search my website… you’ll find plenty of references to him. He’s fantastic. Spike (from Buffy)? Even more crazy, just as fun. He provided so much laughter over the two week period of time I spent watching all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I couldn’t help but fall in love with him.
However, the best examples of mainstream psychos who garner an unexpected amount of love from fans are men. Don’t get me wrong- I adore Spike and Sylar to a point that it probably says something about my mental health that isn’t something to brag about at parties. And even though I would not consider myself a feminist by most standards (in general feminists annoy me and if you have seen any group episodes of Cooking with Gandalf, you’ll know that all but one of my close college friends are male), I really dislike writing for men. Maybe I have to try it again, but generally I like writing from a female perspective, especially since my stories are often written in first person. Thus:
I want to write a novel where the main character is a young female psychopath. I want to examine the impacts of culture, society, and peril on a highly selfish, narcissistic, bloodthirsty girl with the capacity to change if given the right set up. Yes, that’s important to me- the capacity to change. Crazy characters are all well and good, but no person is completely good or bad. Sylar and Spike become heroes (no title reference intended) by the end of their respective TV shows, and that’s why they’re such great characters. Because they have so much room to grow, and they do.
The other thing I want to do with this hypothetical senior thesis novel is let this change occur because of humanity. Not necessarily humanity as a species, but humanity as a psychological concept. Psychopaths are unique in the sense that they reject their own humanity because of a trauma or a chemical imbalance, often unconsciously. What I’m interested in is how do we recapture that humanity, that compassion, in a person whose humanity seems long gone? More specifically, how does the psychopath see this process within herself?
My stories are all largely character-based, but this project would take that further than I’ve ever gone before. Dawned was probably the closest I’ve ever come to writing for crazy people, and it was legitimately the most fun I’ve ever had writing. With this hypothetical project, though, I want to completely immerse myself into this character’s potential, and I want it to reek with humanity, far from it as the character may seem sometimes.
I’m always talking about my unshakeable faith in humanity, but I’ve never written about it. Not really. My stories are always about a person, or a small group of people, fighting against the greater injustice of humanity. There’s never a conflict of who the good guys are. But that’s not how the world works. I want to see what happens when I force the most despicably hillarious (it has to be humorous. Have you met me?) person into a situation where no one really seems to have the moral high ground, and then I want the misguided fools in the struggle to make that despicable person see their potential, whether or not they see it themselves.
Besides, I’m tired of the cookie cutter good guys. Buffy was a fantastic girl, but she always (eventually) makes the right and moral choices. What happens when you have a character who has never made right or moral choices because it’s a helluva lot more fun?
If you’re familiar with the Buffy universe, you might be thinking that I’ll basically be writing a story from Faith’s perspective, but Faith as a character bugged the hell out of me, so I’m not gonna do that. Besides, Faith acted out of fear, and my character will more than likely act purely out of self interest and convenience. Faith wasn’t brave- she had a death wish. My character will kind of be the Russell from Survivor of the female dystopian YA universe. She will be crafty, crazy, and hard to peg down. You will hate her, but you will love that hatred, and in the end you’ll realize that you love her too.
Or, at least, that’s the idea.
