Oh, challenges

[msmcknittington]

I really need to be asleep, but I have tomorrow afternoon to nap all I want. Also, I am totally engrossed in reading about the fall of Llywellyn the Last (which I will never be able to spell right more than once).

I'm having difficulty summoning up sympathetic feelings for the English, which is Big Trouble, because my hero and his entire family are English, and I need to make the heroine's Welsh family into the bad guys. But Longshanks is really showing his ass here, so I'm having trouble doing anything but go, "Oh, the poor oppressed Welsh!"

Did you know that in 1275, Longshanks hired pirates to kidnap Llywellyn's betrothed/wife, Eleanor de Montfort when she sailed from France to go to Llywellyn in Wales? (Freaking pirates! And I always thought that section of "Hamlet" was really far-fetched.) He did! And then he held her hostage until Llywellyn met his demands. And then, in 1283, after Llywellyn had been killed/murdered, his infant daughter Gwenllian was captured by the English, and held in a convent her entire life. She died without issue, natch. And then Longshanks basically ransacked Wales, and appropriated a lot of the most symbolic objects of Gwynedd and scattered them to the wind. Quoting the Wikipedia article on Llywellyn, "Commenting on this [the appropriation of Gwenyedd's treasures] a contemporary chronicler is said to have declared 'and then all Wales was cast to the ground.'" It wasn't just a military defeat, but a political and spiritual one.

So, basically Longshanks is coming off as a big, tall bastard to me. How can I make the Welsh the bad guys after learning all that? I kind of want to rewrite history and make the Welsh victors. I could right now be typing this in Welsh, and you wouldn't even notice because it would be the same as English to us.

But I can't end the story with my hero and heroine living under the threat of the hero being executed for being a Welsh noble and the heroine being locked away as a prisoner until she dies. That's just not the Romance Way.

Another thing I discovered: Everybody in Welsh history appears to have been named Owain, Gruffydd, or Llywellyn. Toss a Rhys and a Rhodri in there, and you've got like 95-percent of 13th-century Welsh males. I can only imagine that you'd walk into a bar, shout Owain!, and everybody would turn around.

Comments

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

Have you read any of Sharon Kay Pennman's stuff? In her Simon de Monfort tale, she successfully separates the English king from the other English people who oppose him. (I haven't read the sequel, which deals more with Longshanks.) They can be English, but still have their own sympathies. Although, complex political sympathies might not be the thing for romance.
;-)

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any Sharon Kay Penman. My library has a really spotty collection, and it tends to be checked out all the time.

I should probably read it

Although, complex political sympathies might not be the thing for romance.

Ha! That's probably not the Romance Way, either. The conflicts tend to be interpersonal, rather than sociopolitical. And if they do involve politics, then it's just as a base for the interpersonal conflicts.

[snowywolfowl.livejournal.com]

Here is a suggestion that admittedly is NOT "the romance way" but have you thought about maybe writing this in flashbacks from your female character's perspective, say maybe a few decades after Longshanks destroys her country and kills all her family?

I will not claim that its romantic, but it certainly helps lock in the bittersweet vibe.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

That sounds too dark for me. I don't think I can handle crying and writing at the same time.

I really just need to amp up the badness of the heroine's father, without making him into a monster. He can't be a child molester or anything, because I want her to actually want him to acknowledge her. He needs to still be human, and I think that child abuse is enough of a polemic that people would react too negatively to it. He just needs to be a piss-poor father, without being a demon.

My parents and I are pretty close, and they are patently not jerks, though, so I'm not quite sure how to approach this. Damn my family for not being messed up!

[snowywolfowl.livejournal.com]

"He just needs to be a piss-poor father, without being a demon...My parents and I are pretty close, and they are patently not jerks, though, so I'm not quite sure how to approach this. Damn my family for not being messed up!"

Hmm. I see your problem. Want to borrow my dad? :-) He was no abusive monster, to be fair, but I think ultimately he felt his family was going to hold him back in life, so changes had to be made, you know? Maybe that's the vibe you're going for?

Seriously, you do have a tough issue here. If you're crying while writing it, it won't be a very romantic read I am sure. I honestly don't know how you get around that, unless you have them run off to France, or have Longstreet have an inexplicable change of heart.

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

He was no abusive monster, to be fair, but I think ultimately he felt his family was going to hold him back in life, so changes had to be made, you know? Maybe that's the vibe you're going for?

Sort of, yes. Right now, I've got it so the heroine's mother died in childbirth/when she was very young, and her father remarried to this fairly dreadful woman. A little bit like Lady MacBeth, beautiful and very ambitious. The heroine was in the way of her path to the father, so she sent her to the convent to get her out of the way. She pushes the father to seek alliances that will improve his social standing and therefore his wealth, and he's so besotted with her, he'll do anything she says.

Wow. Maybe the stepmother is the true villain.

Maybe the ending needs something like a dramatic breakout from the castle followed by exile in France or some such.

I'm planning a confrontation between the hero and the heroine's father in the course of the battle in which Llewellyn the Last was killed/murdered. I know from talking to my friends who do have jerks for parents, that having their boyfriends stand up for them to their parents was a very powerful and emotional moment in their relationship. Anyway, I think the hero and the father will argue in the midst of the battle, and some secondary incident will result in the father being killed and the hero being seriously injured, which will result in the heroine racing across Wales to the monastery where the brother is recuperating, thereby introducing her to his monk brother, and making her reevaluate her desire to be a nun. Ta-da!

You know, I have all these scenes planned, and what's freaking me out about it all is the emotion involved. I can move the the characters like chess pieces across a board, but I can't necessarily make them emote.

[snowywolfowl.livejournal.com]

From what you describe, maybe the stepmom is the true villian, but that might make the father a little weak. I could see the stepmom not caring for the stepdaughter, but if she's being ignored by her dad there's probably something else there. At least that's how I think. Find that, and you find your character's dynamic with her father. Once you find that, you're confrontation scene should tell you what it is.

Good luck with that, seriously. It took me months to get the right dynamic for a father/son conflict in one of my stories, but the wait was worth it to get it right. It helped frame the character, and make him into what the story needed him to be.

I completely understand the sense that the chessboard movement is easy, its the emoting that it hard. Drives me crazy all the time.

[ciorstan.livejournal.com]

Edward Longshanks was NO PRIZE. He imprisoned Isabel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, and her sister-in-law, Mary Bruce, in cages on the exterior walls of the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh respectively. He considered orders to confine ten-year-old Marjorie of Mar in a cage in the Tower of London, but decided that was too cruel-- only because of her age. Isabel was guilty of exercising the ancient right of the MacDuffs to crown the King of Scotland, when she crowned Robert Bruce King. And Mary's crime? She was his sister.

And that is only a small part of what he did in Scotland during the Wars of Independence...

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

Really. He was a big jerk, which kind of came as a surprise to me, because a lot of the history books I've read sort of gloss over the atrocities and just say, "And he conquered Wales and almost conquered Scotland! Ra-ra, England!" Of course, a lot of those books were written before the 1960s, and the tenor of history has changed a lot since then.

The way that Wales is still struggling for freedom in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series is suddenly making so much more sense. My god, I might be willing to throw myself into the cause of Welsh freedom, regardless of how many centuries it's been.

Longshanks? It's really more like Jerkface.