Montana Rose-Take a Chance

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Montana Rose is Cassie's story. The heroine. I have a tendency - or maybe I should say I used to - to write heroines so strong, so kick butt, that it's just over the top. I think that's fun. It's what I like to read.

I've said many times (Ruthy might say - ad nauseum) that I had twenty finished books on my computer when I sold my first book. I think I've learned more variety in characters now, but early on, I was all about hard as nails, self-sufficient females. I realized that about myself. I realized I was getting stale creating the same heroine over and over again. When I finished whatever alpha female came before Cassie, I had this idea for Montana Rose.

It was inspired by Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly. Just the basic foundation of the story. A widowed, pregnant woman, forced into a marriage to a stranger simply to survive.

The similarities to Love Comes Softly need to be pointed out because if I didn't, YOU'D NEVER GUESS. Me being me, I immediately took an alarming turn into mayhem and romantic comedy.

But much of my comedy as coming from the sass of the heroine. To most of us when we're called up on to respond to any situation, I think, well maybe not MOST of us, but anyway, we tend to be non-confrontational. Peace makers. Problem solvers. That's me anyway. But in my books, I like to have a heroine who refuses to back down. Who says out loud the outrageous things we often think but don't say.

This is a tough heroine and this is the root of a lot of comedy. But I knew I was getting stale, so I deliberately set out to write a different kind of heroine. A wimp. A woman people pushed around. A polite, sweet, scared woman who kept every conflicted idea trapped inside.

I just wanted to take a chance, see if I could do it. Learn a new skill. Stop myself from falling into a rut. The trouble was, after I'd written the first part of the book, with sweet little Cassie pretty much just doing whatever she was told, I didn't like her. She was boring.

So she presented me with a great test of my abilities. I had to learn how to show the turmoil inside of Cassie, while presenting this polished, agreeable exterior. In the earlier versions I have her be almost a split personality. I let Ruthy read it and I can't remember the exact words but they were something along the lines of...Do you really want Sybil with fifteen personalities...as your heroine? Cassie is a lunatic.
So I had my hands full creating Cassie, giving her a backstory that explained her weakness. And, me being me, I couldn't leave her weak. I had to toughen her up in the end. I ended up loving her.

And if you aren't real interesting in reading a book about a wimp, check out a secondary character in Montana Rose, Belle Tanner. She’s a sub-character in this book but stars in her own book The Husband Tree, book two in the Montana Marriages series, coming in January.

Belle makes Sophie McClellen from Petticoat Ranch, look like a daisy-chain making, scatter-brained airhead. The title of that book, The Husband Tree, well, the Husband Tree is the tree under which she buries her husbands when they die. We start Belle’s book with her kicking herself for not bothering to mark the former husbands’ graves because she doesn’t want to dig up one of the worthless bums while she’s planting the new one. Because that would make her start a new hole and she has chores to do.
I just couldn’t sustain the wimpy heroine thing for two whole books.

And then in Montana Marriages book three, Wildflower Bride, this heroine, Abby, has never met a man she didn’t pull a knife on.

The point of this lesson is that I want you to check your work. I want you to challenge yourself. I want you to take a chance. Dare yourself to write against the type you're most comfortable with. I'd be interested to hear if you think you've gotten stale, if you've got a 'type' that you create and why do you think you do that? And what are you going to do to shake things up?