I’ve always
been more than just a bit of an odd duck. I was told—though I don’t really
recall—that when the “Lassie” theme song would come on, [the theme known as “The
Whistler”], I would cry. I couldn’t have been more than four or five at the
time.
Then, fast
forward pre-teen and teen years, and watching episodes of I Love Lucy. They
weren’t first run episodes but reruns, and it wasn’t so much that I wanted to
watch them as Mom watched them, and if I wanted to enjoy television, then so did
I. I distinctly remember watching this show, everyone laughing at
the antics of the zany redhead, and me left feeling...embarrassed.
Seriously, I
was embarrassed on behalf of that ditzy woman. Sometimes I would even cover my
face with my hands. Yes, that embarrassed, as if those moments were
happening to me.
That was
probably taking empathy to the extreme, but I didn’t know that at the time. I
was just a kid, after all. And that’s just how I was.
And it wasn’t
just these television shows, either, where I experienced this sort of a
reaction. It happened more times than I could count—music would move me to
tears, and comedy programs would make me feel uncomfortable. And horror movies?
Or movies where the characters were threatened/tortured/killed? Not happening.
As far as I was concerned, those genres didn’t even exist. As an adult I still
refuse to watch horror, or movies where the lead characters are
killed.
Strangely, that
aversion to what I considered stupid comedy stayed with me a long time. I had to
become an adult before I lost the tendency to think, “oh my goodness I am just
going to slither down in my chair while that actor/actress makes an total ass of
themselves.” We’re talking, probably, twenty years ago when I finally broke that
habit.
And yet traces
of that strange reaction live on, coming awake again in this second career of
mine, as I contemplated plots and plot twists for my characters.
In the
beginning, I had a real hard time putting my characters in peril—or having them
involved in really bad arguments. The romance genre is rife with stories where
the heroes and heroines have terrible fights, and then walk away from each other
and the love that the reader knows is so right for them.
It doesn’t
matter that they then, a chapter or two later, come together again. I could not
let my characters have those kinds of fights.
You might be
thinking, well, how silly, and yet, in a way, that I would feel this way makes
sense.
I’d begun to
explore my creative side as an author when I was still a kid—a kid who never
quite really dealt with the loss of her father. My reality at the time was so
sad, that I turned to writing to create my on world. Of course, that world had
to be vastly different from the world I knew. Conflict, in those early stories,
was a definite no-no, because in my world nothing bad was allowed to
happen.
Sometimes the
habits we form as children stay with us beyond our need for them. The first few
times we consciously choose to break those old patterns, it’s uncomfortable. But
that discomfort is not a sign that what we’re doing by changing our behavior is
wrong.
It is merely a
sign that we are doing something different and stepping into the
unknown.
These days I do
have my characters in peril, sometimes hurt, wounded, possibly near death. They
can have rip roaring fights but never quite manage that moment of turning
away—even to turn back a chapter later.
Oh, and there
is one thing you will never find in my books: a stupid heroine. That’s right, I
still haven’t broken that habit. And when I’m reading a book, and I encounter
one?
Well, let’s
just say I don’t quite want to slink down in my seat in total, empathic
mortification for the silly woman’s extreme stupidity.
But it’s
close.
Love,
Morgan
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