Female Rage and Anger as Armor: Not Writing About Angels

“Just don’t pretend you know more about your
characters than they do, because you don’t.”

— Anne Lamott

“Pick your battles,” she muttered in her ear.
“I am! I’m picking this one! I’m picking all of them!”

― Lauren James, Another Beginning

Cover art for the upcoming novel Requiem Descent.
Artwork by Malice Ghoul

When I was at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival on USC Campus earlier this year, I was telling another writer about my character Skye Wright. I pointed to one of my recent books. “This is the one where she gut punches her boyfriend.”
“Oh. So your character engages in domestic violence,” she replied.
“Well… yeah, I suppose you could say that.”
“You shouldn’t write about such things. You need to change your vibe.”
“Lady, I ain’t writing about angels. These characters are drunks and drug addicts and wild musicians.”

Skye Wright is a character of mine who keeps growing and evolving, even though she was never supposed to be a main character. (Something I’ve written about before.) I cannot say she is based on or chiefly inspired by one specific person. (Unlike my character Miranda Scholl who was mainly inspired by my old friend Marian Anderson.) She was generally inspired by many of the women I’ve known in the scene over the years. Beautiful, wild, and frightening. (And by frightening I don’t mean just scary looking, but also scary for reasons!)

The one side of Skye Wright that does mirror myself is her childhood past. She is a survivor of child abuse. Throughout her young life she was subjected to emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, chiefly at the hands of her father. The abuse which she had to endure would later manifest itself in her alcoholism, drug abuse, and her violent temper.

Skye is well aware that her quickness to anger is a significant factor of who she is. In my upcoming novel Nobody’s Hero she loses her temper at a show when the singer of a band mocks her from the stage. She ends up pulling him off the stage and attacking him. Only her friend Miranda is able to stop her, as Miranda grabs her and pulls her out of the club before they are accosted by security.

The aftermath of such outbursts are only so heavy for Skye. Even though she is, by the time of the singer incident, maintaining her sobriety through twelve step, she has little interest in anger management. In fact, in another upcoming novel, a twelve stepper tells a distraught Skye, in an overtly professorial manner, that anger is fear turned inward. Skye responds to his unsolicited piece of wisdom by offering to break his jaw with her inward fear.

Another depiction of Skye Wright.
This one by fellow punk author Dani Dassler.

Two of her most pointed memories from her childhood come from the extreme physical abuse of her oft drunken father. One of her earliest memories is when he father burst into her room, while her and a couple of her friends were dancing to frantic electronica music. He kicked in her door and started beating her because they had been making too much noise. Her friends fled from her room and ran out of the house as he smacked and hit and threw a very young Skye around her room. He kept hitting her even though he did not realize that she had hit her head against the window sill and was bleeding badly from her forehead, the only time she had ever been so badly wounded from a fight that she needed medical attention.

But that was not the most frightening thing her father ever did to her. One night, a few years after he had split her head open, he had come home in a drunken rage and was tearing the house apart: breaking furniture, kicking in doors, and smashing plates and glasses. Skye’s mother and sister had fled the house as Skye hid in a closet, scrunching herself into a corner and covering herself with coats and clothes in case he looked in the closet, trembling in abject terror because she believed if her father had found her, he would have killed her.

The one time in her entire life when she was the most frightened, when she thought her father was going to kill her, when she thought she only had a few more terrifying moments left before she was going to die.

Years later, as a teenager, she would experienced another frightening incident when a drunken teenager attacked a friend of hers when her and several other teenagers were drinking in a park. Everyone ran out of the park as a very drunk young man held her friend to the ground, pulling off her clothes in what was going to be an apparent rape attempt. Skye could have run in fright as the rest of her friends had done, but that was the night when her fear turned on its head and quickly morphed into blind rage. She ended up attacking the young man, and after a difficult struggle, she had him on the ground, his nose bleeding and his ears ringing from Skye’s attack. From that point she started literally kicking his face in. Only the intervention of a nearby girl gang who had heard all of the commotion kept her from injuring the man further, or possibly even killing him.

That night she quickly walked home, holding her bloody hands out as she felt the wet blood turn into hard and dry flakes, with her t-shirt and skirt covered in the man’s blood. She would bury her clothes in the backyard of her house that same night, and with it she buried a part of herself, turning her towards a new way of handling strife, conflict, and danger.

(All of this will be highly detailed in a book about young Skye, coming out in 2024!)

Would this make her a less than noble character? Would her quickness to anger and violent temper that frequently manifested itself as physical violence dilute any notion that she is an altruistic person? Pretty much! Am I motivated to bring her to a higher purpose, to make her more heroic so that she’s more of a model of higher ideals than a potential bringer of angst and mayhem?

Well, I can’t do that. It’s just wouldn’t be who she is.

I could try and wrench this character into someone she simply is not, and I have no doubts that many writers have done so with many of their characters. But for Skye to remain true to herself, she has to go on her own path, a way of life that she has chosen for herself, not one that I try to enforce on her. Indeed, I knew she had a bad temper, and a violent nature, and I knew some of the reasons why that was so, but I did not really know her and her rage for what it really was until recently, as I’m writing yet another Skye story, one in which her emotions get the better of her, and she finds herself on a demented and regrettable road trip.

It’s not as if Skye is simply a cauldron of rage. Far from it. She has deeply held beliefs about business, friendship, and justice. She has used her club brawling skills to defend friends, or people who were simply being bullied. She believes that loyalty is, by far, the most important facet of friendship, and she has definite scruples about how she maneuvers the music industry. There are things she staunchly refuses to do in order to further her career or her band’s success, even though her band is getting more popular by the day. And to say she is a progressive would be putting it lightly. Her politics steer quite left of center, even though there is not much political discourse in any of these stories.

It took all this time, years and years of writing, before I realized that her rage was part of her armor, that it was one of the ways in which she protects and preserves herself, that she was doing everything to make sure she was never scared or helpless again.

Cover art for the Rise and Fall of Skye Wright
by Helga Protiv. I was floored when I
received this. It was beyond what I hoped for!

It’s not as if she’s always comfortable with her temper and her rage. She does beat herself up on occasion for getting too stressed out, or simply losing too much control. Indeed, she has had a lifelong regret over what she had done to the first victim of her rage, the drunken young man who tried to molest a friend of hers. She knows that she did not need to go so far to ward the man off, that when she had him on the ground with a bloody nose she had already done everything she needed to do to defend her friend and herself, that further violence and mayhem were not necessary. Two more ideas about that night torture her psyche even more: that she has any remorse at all over greviously injuring a would-be rapist does eat at her, as does the idea that if the gang had not shown up to pull her off of the man she was mauling, she might very well have gone far enough to actually kill him.

In ruminating on my discoveries about my character Skye, I know I still have a lot more to find out about my complex and diverse character, as I try to get to know someone who doesn’t even know herself as much as she would like to, or needs to.

Nobody’s Hero, about Skye and her band, is coming out this Fall. Her next book, Requiem Descent, will be out in early 2024.

In the meantime, you can read about her and her punk adventures in these books:

You can find the entire Skye Wright series below.
Just click on the pic for all three books!

Stella Maris is the sequel to my previous novel. Even though it can be read
by itself, check out what Skye was up to before her adventures in Stella Maris!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09G586JB6