Have you ever picked up a book by an author you have never heard of before and read the cover flap, gotten excited about the heroine of the story, only to find that the heroine was completely different in the actual story than you were led to believe?  Yeah, it's happened to me too.  Or you read a series and the heroine, who started out as a strong character who is completely necessary to the story, becomes a deflated wimpy version of herself.  It drives me insane.

In an effort to get rid of these kinds of stories, I want to let you in on the heroine.  Whether she's an ancient queen in a faraway land or a high school sophomore thrown into the middle of teenage angst, she's vital to your story and you need to make sure you treat her with the respect and delicacy she deserves.

I've worked with three heroines so far and I had to make sure that my notes on each were detailed and concise. I had to think past my feminist roots and look at each situation my heroine would have to face as if I'd never encountered the obstacle before.  With Rhoswen, my heroine from Prophecy, I had to seriously stop and think before I made her pregnant in Forbidden.  Would Rhoswen be excited about a coming baby or would she be terrified by the change in her life?  I weighed all the options before deciding what she would and wouldn't be.

But Rhoswen was easy.  I created her out of my life, twisting certain elements to give her more life and believability.  I knew her inside and out because she is me.  Working with Guin and Breanna proved to be infinitely harder.

Guin is someone that could not really exist, and yet she does exist in every single teenage girl on the face of the planet.  She wants her own life, to be able to make her own decisions and mistakes, she wants freedom.  I remember being in that stage of my life, but it was a long time ago.  I had to watch a lot of television and read a lot of *gulp* magazines to be able to figure out how to create Guin to be who she is.  But had I not done that, she would have been a flat, unbelievable caricature of herself.

Breanna is even harder to figure out than Guin is.  Breanna lives in the 1780s.  Sure, she's a teenager, but being a teenager in that day and age meant something completely different than it does now.  There's no one alive from that time frame to help me figure out what kind of person she is.  So I had to turn to books again and dig through history to find out what life was like for a girl her age in that day and time and try to adapt that information to the aspects of Breanna's character that wouldn't change with time.  Breanna is strong and independent, yet she knows when to listen to the guidance of others and when to fall back to protect herself and those she loves.  She is still under development, but she no longer confounds me.

If you want to create a heroine, you need to be sure that you know who she is and will become as the story continues.  Anticipate her actions and decisions, think through her responses.  Don't radically change her from one story to the next.  Instead, make the progression natural as she moves from one stage of life to the next.  Rhoswen was tough in Prophecy, hard and standoffish.  But by the end, she's a strong woman who finally understands what it means to love someone so much that you'd be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for him.  Then she moves from that stage of her life to a wife and mother.  I hope I made it flawless, but I'm sure I didn't.

Try not to make your heroine the opposite of herself from one story to the next, or even one chapter to the next, unless you're working with a character that has multiple personalities or is clinically insane.  It's always hard to read a heroine that you love turn into a coward when she wouldn't be or a bad guy when she's not being manipulated by the forces of darkness.

Finally, be prepared to edit like crazy when you're done writing the first draft.  We all create circumstances that make our heroine into something she shouldn't be.  Find those pages and fix them.  Comb through your heroine's life on those pages and make sure she is who she is instead of someone she isn't.  And take great care with her.  Remember, she may not be written as delicate, but she truly is.