“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.”
The opening lines of Gillian Flynn’s sophomore novel, Dark Places, were the product of a complete rewrite after the author realized her main character Libby Day was someone that she despised as a character, and someone that she despised writing. Flynn wrote this first version of her main character in hopes that this would be the best route for her to take from a careerist perspective. Her first novel, Sharp Objects, focused on a dark, bad women, but she felt that she could not be pigeonholed into this niche. When reflecting upon her first draft of Dark Places, her husband asked her what she thought of Libby, and Flynn responded with “God, I can’t stand her. She’s so optimistic and so perky, and she just drives me crazy.” It was after that consultation with her husband that Gillian Flynn finally made the decision to write what she needed to write, not what she was supposed to write.
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| Gillian Flynn for Time Magazine. |
Growing up, Gillian Flynn’s father was a film professor. She was constantly surrounded by movies, and even now, she described in an interview with Fast Company how her two great loves are films and books. As a kid, her writing was always based in a fairly dark, “otherworldly reality” with someone having something bad happen to them (Fast Company). Gillian went to college to study journalism in hopes of becoming a crime reporter. She realized very early on that she was not cut out for writing tough crime, but what she could write about was movies and TV. Out of college, she got a job at Entertainment Weekly and began writing for herself at night.
Although her third and most recent novel Gone Girl is what she is best known for, her first novel also had the same dark and complex lead female character that fans of her breakthrough novel loved. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Flynn describes how she thinks that women have just as many issues with aggression and anger as men do, but that they express those emotions differently, and they are not talked about as frequently. When she was working on getting her first novel published, the same reason that Gone Girl became so popular was the reason why various publishers turned her down for Sharp Objects. She explained how she heard that a lot of people did not want to read about women like Camille, her main character. They wanted to read about people they could route for and those that are heroic. Flynn then countered these claims in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that Camille is in fact very heroic, and sometimes the most heroic thing that a person that goes through extremely traumatic and painful things can do is to just keep their head above water.
Although her third and most recent novel Gone Girl is what she is best known for, her first novel also had the same dark and complex lead female character that fans of her breakthrough novel loved. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Flynn describes how she thinks that women have just as many issues with aggression and anger as men do, but that they express those emotions differently, and they are not talked about as frequently. When she was working on getting her first novel published, the same reason that Gone Girl became so popular was the reason why various publishers turned her down for Sharp Objects. She explained how she heard that a lot of people did not want to read about women like Camille, her main character. They wanted to read about people they could route for and those that are heroic. Flynn then countered these claims in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning that Camille is in fact very heroic, and sometimes the most heroic thing that a person that goes through extremely traumatic and painful things can do is to just keep their head above water.
Despite Flynn feeling comfortable with her product after going through an strenuous process of rewriting, the field and critics were not ready for that kind of a paradigm shift. Much like Einstein in Gardner's Creative Minds, Gillian Flynn exhibited Gardner’s role of The Child and the Master. Flynn broke through in writing with Gone Girl because she did not accept the norms for writing women at that time and the criticisms of her first novel. In order to create Gone Girl, Flynn went back to the basic, conceptual ideas and inspirations that were more simplistic, which she could then expand upon. Flynn had been let go from Entertainment Weekly right before she began writing Gone Girl, and she could not find another job as a writer. Instead of giving up, she utilized her current situation to help get into the mind of Nick Dunne, one of the main characters.
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| The opening and closing scene of Gone Girl. |
In Teresa M. Amabile’s Beyond Talent: John Irving and the Passionate Craft of Creativity, Amabile describes how the componential model of creativity has three domains including: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, and intrinsic task motivation. Flynn was able to exhibit that she possessed both domain-relevant skills and creativity-relevant processes, however, as Amabile states, it was Flynn’s intrinsic task motivation that thrust her forward and allowed for the momentous success of Gone Girl. She did not care that the publishers or readers may not fall in love with her characters or story. Flynn wrote her characters and story the way she wanted to because that was what she desired more than anything.
It was this straying from the normal character archetypes that have drawn so many fans to Flynn’s work. It was not the first time that a woman was portrayed as evil in books or on film. The long held “idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing and bemoaned the ‘spunky heroines,’ ‘soul-searching fashionistas,’ and ‘dismissible bad’ tramps and vamps” in contemporary fiction are completely dismantled by Flynn with her characters (The Washington Post). A journalist for The Washington Post notes how Flynn allows the women in her novels to be complicated, flawed, profane, unsympathetic; even, “pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish”. The women in Sharp Objects echo remnants of familiar archetypes — the prodigal daughter, the chilly matriarch, the “woman-child with a gorgeous body...asserting her power over lesser creatures” — however, Flynn “acid-strips them of sentiment.” In an interview with Chicago Magazine, Flynn stated:
“I’ve nurtured my dark side very carefully. I’m not someone who’s ever wanted to get rid of my demons. I don’t want them to take over, but I couldn’t empathize with my screwed-up and dark characters and disturbed narrators unless I had pieces of them.”
Flynn is passionate about writing dark and complex female characters because she can, to a certain degree, empathize with them. Her field had yet to represent any women like this, and instead of waiting for someone to write them for her, she went ahead and wrote those characters herself without any care for what the critics thought.
After the success of Gone Girl, Flynn was offered a deal for a movie adaptation. It is very rare that the author ever gets to be the screenwriter for their movie adaptation, but after sitting down with the director, they offered her the position. The director of Gone Girl, David Fincher, when describing her screenwriting, said, “Gillian writes like an audience member. She is the thirteen year old with a bucket of popcorn in her lap watching a movie.” Flynn writes both her novels and her screenwriting the way she would want them if she were the one experiencing them. When HBO approached her about an adaptation of Sharp Objects, twelve years after it was published, Flynn once again felt like she had to have some creative control over the adaptation. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Flynn said:
“I was worried that adapting Sharp Objects to a film would lose that character study, and I always felt that Sharp Objects was more of a character study than a mystery. I want the expansiveness to explore the character in a different way. Who is she? Not, who done it?”
Whether it is work on her novels or on TV and film, Flynn makes sure that her work is representative of herself and the way she personally wants it to be. With her Sharp Objects adaptation, Flynn used her knowledge that she had gained from screenwriting Gone Girl and was an Executive Producer for the successful HBO mini series.
In Teresa M. Amabile’s article Perspectives on the Social Psychology of Creativity, Amabile states how harmonious passion, a critical part of internal motivation for creativity, is defined as:
“The autonomous internalization of an activity, making it part of one’s identity and thus creating a sense of personal enjoyment and free choice about pursuing the activity.”
Flynn’s characters are part of her, and she in turn, is part of them. She enjoys writing these dark and complex characters because they are her own and no one else’s. Flynn’s ability to open up the door and create a space in the literary field and TV and movie industry for complex, anti-hero women not only highlights her creativity, but also her ability to persevere. The struggle for more representation in the media and pop culture is not over, however. Flynn described in an interview with Vulture how:
“I think fiction, as far as it regards women, just needs to tackle that idea of pressing to make sure that women of all different types are seen and explored and related to. That was my push, that women do have their dark side, and that should be allowable. I don’t know that there has to be a push of “the uglier the better”; that’s never been my motto. Let’s allow women their full range of emotions, good and bad. Let’s allow women their full range of good and bad qualities. And we still need to see tons more women of color, more LGBTQ, all kinds of women represented of different socioeconomic stature. There’s always room to see more kinds of women.”
She recognizes how her success was fundamental in the push for more representation, but what is important is that she recognizes that this was only one step in the process. There is always going to be more to be done, and only time will tell what Flynn, or other creatives, does next.
References:
https://whatscreativeluc.blogspot.com/2018/10/go-ahead-shit-on-me-i-dont-mind-im-cool.html
I LOVE gone girl and im so glad you wrote about Flynn!! We were discussing doing her as our contemporary creative for the first project because of the paradigm shift sharp objects and gone girl created within literature and film. I love how she not only is giving women more space in these creative works, but she makes them complex and real. She uses their femininity and womanhood in nontraditional ways, showing the raw and dark parts of what it is to be a woman in a bad relationship or with a mental illness.
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