“Beautiful”

This is the first paragraph of my novel the Other Side, of which I posted an excerpt a while back:

My name is Taia Marie Eaton. I am 23 years old. A graduate of UCLA. A planner. A dreamer. A teacher. A student. A woman of creativity. I am multifaceted and always changing. Contradictory. Flawed. I am things I like and things I dislike. Intelligent. Questioning. Beautiful. At times, selfish. Doubtful. Complacent. Always striving to give. To ask. To be. To try. To improve. 

I generally think the novel has a really good premise that I did the most obvious possible thing with. Just the fact that a romantic love story is important to it is proof of how much my writing preferences have changed. If I were to rewrite it now, the closest thing it would get to having a romantic love story would be for the main character to be in a happy relationship that adds no drama to the novel at all.

What really strikes me about this paragraph now is that she knows she’s beautiful. So while it may have a love story, at least it doesn’t involve the cliched protagonist who doesn’t think she’s beautiful and doesn’t expect any guy to ever think she is. So that’s a win for past me.