Writing Weeping Women

In addition to a penchant for vomit I seem to have developed a habit of writing weeping women. This concerns me. It feels totally organic while I’m writing but when I read over the stuff I’m like: “Hey, Beth, do you think these ladies cry too much? They cry kind of a lot, don’t you think?”

And, like, I know Viola cries with her father a great deal, but I’m pretty sure half the time its an act to get him to hold her, so I guess that’s alright. But then Maggie gets weepy a fair amount, and I know she’s got pregnancy hormones going on, but still… I don’t know.

And then there’s Jonah, and one of his leading character traits is that he’s really good with weeping women. He’s like, a pro at comforting a sobbing bitch, which means it happens around him a lot right? Like, more than normal? An inordinate amount of ladies get the impulse to break down in tears around him? So is there something about him that triggers that hormonal response in them or what?

I like crying, myself. I’m the kind of woman who has all these emotions just brimming at the surface and ready to spill over so it feels perfectly natural to me when, for instance, Viola melts into a puddle of weepiness, but I’m concerned that I’m doing a disservice to women. I’m a feminist. I’m a modern woman. I don’t want to write an unintentionally sexist or misogynistic work of denigration. (Let’s not even get started on the sex stuff right now or we’ll be here for hours. I mean, listen: Women like sex and they like it as much if not more than men do, and guess what? They like it all kinds of ways. They can like it rough, ok? Jeesh. And they are capable of seduction and underhanded things and it does not make me a misogynist to paint such a picture. Does it? I fucking hope not. I love a lady who takes charge, and manipulation is the woman’s chief tool for taking power in relationships—it has only been very recent history that we’ve had ‘equal’ rights you know, and um, we really still don’t in most parts of the world so…. Oh Christ, fuck this tangent, I’mma save it for another day. Or maybe never.)

But people cry, don’t they? They do. It happens. Like vomit, it happens to us all at some point or another. And certainly I have Jonah cry and tear-up and he’s a man…

I just. Ug. Just second guessing a lot. It happens. And now I’m writing Avalon, whom I kind of adore, but she’s really complicated and I’m not sure if I’m doing her justice. I just don’t want it to seem like she’s got a permanent case of PMS or something.

One of my very favorite characters\performances of all time is Kate Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. She's perfection. And she's ferocious, you know? She's strong and smart and sexy and funny and witty and clever and vulnerable, so vulnerable and honest and alive. She can stare you down, wither your cock with a glance, you know, and in the next moment she can crumple like a paper-doll. When she cries in the film, and she does it here and there and everywhere, that doesn't ever diminish her strength, it only seems to enhance it-- make her more compelling, more phenomenal. My writing isn't anywhere close to that, not nearly, but I guess I'm really strongly influenced by the idea that crying is not necessarily a weakness or a flaw. A vulnerability, yes, but also an openness and a purity of the soul.

I think I’m going to keep an eye on when and where and why my characters cry from now on, monitor it a little more closely and challenge myself to seek an alternative route. See if I can go another direction—will it still tell the same story? Will it make the story better? Will the story suffer unless I just go with the flow?

I guess we’ll see.

Thanks for listening to me bitch.