Not All Women Want Soppy Love Stories: Writing Heroines with Guts and Grace
Why Maggie Grant isn’t a damsel in distress, and how real women use their strength, smarts, and even charm to survive.
Not All Women Want Soppy Love Stories: Writing Heroines with Guts and Grace
I know there’s a huge audience for sweet, swoony romances with noble, perfect heroes. And that’s fine. But it’s not what I’m writing. Because not all women want that. A lot of us want our heroines to have guts. To be flawed. To make mistakes. To fight dirty if they have to.
We want women who don’t sit around waiting to be rescued. Who can take a hit and keep going. Who know what they want and aren’t too polite to go after it. But also, this part is important, who don’t lose their femininity in the process.
That balance is what I wanted with Maggie Grant in The Alpha Flame: Discovery. She’s not your typical damsel. She’s sharp-tongued, strong-willed, and more than a little dangerous when cornered. But she’s also strategic enough to use charm when it helps. She knows when to flirt, when to soften her tone, when to let someone underestimate her. Because being a woman, really being a woman, means using every tool you have to survive.
Grit Doesn’t Mean Losing Your Femininity
Too often, “strong female character” gets flattened into one idea: someone who fights like a man, never cries, never charms, never bends. But real women are more complicated than that. Real strength is knowing when to be hard and when to be soft. When to use anger and when to use empathy. When to lean in close and make someone believe you’re harmless, until you aren’t.
Maggie knows this. She can threaten with her fists, sure, but she can also smile sweetly to get information. She can hold back tears until she’s alone. She’s brave enough to do ugly things for the people she cares about. But she also likes looking good. She likes feeling like herself. She’s feminine without apology, because none of that makes her weaker.
Facing Trauma on the Page
One of the reasons I write my female characters this way is because too many women know what it means to survive real violence. Real trauma. When you gloss over that in fiction, you risk making those readers feel unseen, or worse, like their pain is something to be hidden. I wanted to show Maggie and Beth going through truly dark moments, not to exploit them, but to acknowledge them. To say: yes, this happens. Yes, it’s ugly. And yes, you can still be strong, clever, even tender after it.
Writing about trauma honestly is uncomfortable. But it can also be empowering. It gives readers who’ve been through it a chance to see themselves surviving. It refuses to lie about the cost, but also refuses to deny the possibility of hope. That’s not “soppy” romance, it’s something more resilient, more real.
That’s the kind of heroine I wanted to write. And that’s the kind of story The Alpha Flame is. Not a love story where she waits for rescue, but one where she rescues herself, and doesn’t lose who she is in the process.
Read more about The Alpha Flame: Discovery here and meet a heroine who knows how to survive without apology.