All About Alphas 21 - Questions and Answers

A question from Rachel today -

The Alpha Male...my downfall in more ways than one! My question is about getting
the balance right with Mr Alpha. My most recent MS was (very nicely) rejected,
one of the reasons being the hero, he:

'has a tendency to frighten the
reader off with his ferocity and is also in danger of being negated for his
'alphaness'(the very quality that readers come to the books for)'.

I'd really like your thoughts on getting the Alpha character somewhere between too
'ferocious' and just too damn 'nice'. He has to be pretty ruthless if he is to
(for example) coerce the heroine into a marriage of convenience doesn't he? The
intial conflict between the characters also blazes in the first three chapters,
so you can't have him grinning happily too much either.

On the submission front, I'm wondering if my synopsis let me down. Surely it's possible for the hero to be 'ferocious' in the first three chapters and then gradually
redeem himself layer by layer over the rest of the book?

The 'execution' clearly needs some work in my case!

Rachel I’m almost tempted to say ‘go and look at the answer to Caroline’s question and then reverse it’ – because you too need to have a deeper understanding of what an alpha hero is like and to see that there are far more shades of grey than black and white in portraying such a hero successfully.

In her comment on Annie West’s blog, Anna Campbell said that she used Annie’s books 'as examples when people start talking about 'alpha pigs'. And if there’s a phrase that’s going to set my teeth on edge then it’s that ‘alpha pigs’. Along with brute/bully/domineering/cruel etc etc etc. If a ‘protagonist’ in a book – I can’t possibly call him a hero - is a pig then he isn’t a pig because he’s an alpha – he’s a pig because he’s a pig, plain and simple. And very probably an unredeemable pig because I have no faith at all in instant conversions, pigs who suddenly turn into princes with one hasty ‘but I love you’ and suddenly all is well.

Let’s go over this again – the alpha doesn’t get to his position if life by trampling weaker people under foot, he isn’t totally lacking in charm or generosity or a sense of humour. He doesn’t act brutally, ruthlessly, relentlessly except when the circumstances demand it of him, when he can see no other possible choice, when the only strategy is one that he feels he has no alternative but to follow because of the way that the challenge is presented to him. This is how he feels he, with his personal code of honour, must act - and that personal code may give him the conviction that he’s on the right path – at first - but as he goes through the story that conviction is challenged and has to adjust, adapt and finally be thrown overboard as he realises that he is working from the wrong page.

He is not anti-women, or cruel for the sake of it. He is in a situation where he may have to act that way in the circumstances. The information he has been given about the woman he is dealing with – his heroine – may be flawed, inaccurate – but he believes it is right and that he is justified in acting on it.

One of the problems here can be the use of the hero’s POV. In the past, the reader only had the heroine’s point of view through which to see and judge the hero. And because of the intensity and emotion of the circumstances in which she found herself – the conflict – the challenge – she couldn’t into his head, she didn’t know why he was behaving in the way he was, the faulty information he’d been fed. So she would see him as being cruel, ruthless, cold etc etc - and that was the view the reader got. Now, with the use of the hero’s POV, we get to look inside his head – and this can work for or against the character of the hero. It’s a fine line between thinking that this particular woman is a scheming, manipulative gold-digger on this evidence and that information – and thinking that women are just nasty scheming gold-diggers in general. The same with a defensive shield that goes up before a man who is realising that in this particular instance he’s been badly wrong-footed, his back is against the wall, and he comes out with something deliberately provocative and challenging or declares ‘you do as I say or else’ and a man who really believes that he has the right in general to tell a heroine how to behave ‘or else’.

A man who is fighting with himself as well as the situation he finds himself in may act in a way that seems outrageous to the heroine in the situation she’s in with him – but if in his own thoughts he shows that that outrageous behaviour is totally justified and that treating anyone cruelly, behaving arrogantly to any and everyone is not a hero. And again that’s not because he’s an alpha it’s because he’s an arrogant bullying pig.

So no your hero won’t be ‘grinning happily’ but he will be changing, adapting, showing his heroine a different face slowly and gradually through the book. And if you show his POV then you need to show him questioning what he believed at the outset, adapting that, adjusting to that.

Finally, and perhaps for me the most important part of this is to come back to my own personal obsession with the question WHY. Why is the hero doing what he’s doing? Why is he behaving as he does? Why does he believe his actions are justified ? If he is simply behaving that way because it’s ‘alpha’ – then it’s not. An alpha is a man who has the intelligence and ability to get where he is in life and stay there. A man with friends, family, employees who care for him and he cares for them too. And above all he is the man that the heroine is going to fall in love with. Along with the alpha pig accusation – the other problem I have is the description of a Presents heroine as TSTL (too stupid to live) and that’s what you risk if you have her putting up with the most appalling behaviour and insults and then falls into his arms when he simply says ‘I love you.’
So two important points – the more outrageous behaviour you give your hero the stronger you have to make his motivations, his belief that such behaviour is justified because of the conflict - the challenge that is presented to him. Yes, it’s possible for him to be ‘ferocious’ at first and then gradually change - but from the very start you need to show that that ‘ferocity’ is justified.
And in order to make your heroine convincing as a modern woman, one with a brain in her head, the more you need to give her something to fall in love with. (And if you take the paragraph above with that then the more outrageously he behaves the more you have to counterbalance that with something she can see and believe justifies what he has done.)

I always find it helps to look at your own DH/partner/the person you love. Look at the way you want your hero to behave, the reasons behind his actions, the motivations you’ve given him – if you were the heroine and your DH or whoever was the hero could you forgive them, could you accept this behaviour on those justifications? And never forget what used to be called ‘getting to know you ‘ time – a love story isn’t just ‘wham, bang, wham bang . . .’ – there are lulls and moments of adjustment. Moments when your hero and heroine learn more about each other.

That much needed emotional intensity comes in waves up and down and with each peak and trough there is an adjustment so that when they move on again things have changed and they have to behave in subtly different ways because of that. Sometimes the problem can be that when you are reading an exciting, pacy novel, those are the moments that stick in your head – you need to look at the softer notes too, the shading that makes the hero a fully developed character not a posturing pantomime villain.

© Kate Walker 2009

All About Alphas 19 - Questions and Answers

So - to round up the All About Alphas discussion, I want to go back to the questions that have been asked and look at them again in the light of all that has been talked about - and hopefully the answers now mean more and help more.

Jill said:

Oh boy, this is one I need help with I think. What do you do if it is
hard for you to "think" alpha male? It doesn't help that the two men I've
known best in my life (my father and my wonderful husband) are not
traditional alphas. They are more your laid back, take life as it comes sort
of guys, which I love. Great cooks, comfortable around women, pets, and
children, paragons really. At least according to them! ;-)

I just draw a blank when I try and write a guy with an
"alpha" edge.

I would hope that by now we’ve answered this question for you, Jill - but just in case . . .

The point is that the I suspect your image of an ‘alpha male’ needs a bit of rounding out. There is nothing wrong at all with an alpha – any alpha – being “more your laid back, take life as it comes sort of guys, which I love. Great cooks, comfortable around women, pets, and children, paragons really”.

Because I would expect that if you take most of the alpha heroes (and let’s face it, we’ve just about established that all M&B heroes are alphas in one way or another) and put them in the company of their mothers, brothers, sisters, friends – and eventually their wives, everyone would say they were that sort of guy. An alpha doesn’t get where he is by trampling people underfoot, by being tough or even ruthless – though some of them do,. But they also use skill, charm, intelligence. . . Being an alpha doesn’t negate being great cooks – for me that would be an alpha plus attribute – and it’s definitely NOT an alpha characteristic to be uncomfortable around women and children. What about all those ‘secret baby’ books where the hero knows nothing about the child he has fathered but when he finds out, you can be damn sure he’ll be a wonderful father. Sometimes a single dad.

So we’re back to that moment again when the challenge comes into the situation – the conflict. We’re looking at this self same man when the standards, ‘rules’ morals by which he lives his life are challenged. When he believes that something is wrong and he must do something about it. And when he believes that the heroine is somehow involved – which makes her the one woman he feels he should never have anything to do with but at the same time she’s becoming the woman he wants most in all the world.

So he’s having to fight his attraction to her as well as himself together with all the things that go to make up the ‘challenge.’

And of course then there's the love part of the story - because a romance is telling a love story. And love is a great one for knocking people off balance. Not everyone falls in love easily and quickly or recognises it for what is is when it hits them. As I'm writing this, the song Love Changes Everything is on the CD player - with the words:

Off into the world we go,
Planning futures, shaping years.
Love, bursts in, and suddenly
All our wisdom disappears.


Love
Makes fools of everyone:
All the rules we make are broken

And that’s what puts the edge in there. It’s this situation, this woman, this conflict that sharpens that edge. I’m totally convinced that your father and your husband would soon show a less laid back approach if they felt that you/their children/something they believed in totally/their moral standards etc were challenged. Of course there is nothing wrong at all with an alpha hero who meets this challenge with charm and intelligence etc too - but personally I find that when I knock my heroes off balance they tend to react with intensity and steel.

So it seems to me that perhaps it’s the conflict that you have a problem with. Finding a conflict that really matters, that makes a hero stiffen his spine and tighten his jaw is a challenge to the writer too. You need to put yourself in the places of those guys in your life and see what would make them fight to the death emotionally, what would throw them off balance, what would challenge them.

Because it’s in the conflict between the hero and heroine that the story lies. If they meet, all is well, or the hero says ‘Oh, that’s OK, that doesn’t matter . . .’ then there’s going to be no book. You need something that comes between them something that makes the reader worry if this is going to come out right – that’s what keeps them turning the pages.
© Kate Walker 2009

I hope this helps.