Characters Are
People Too.
Characters are people too. I don’t mean that characters appear
behind you, looming over the back of your chair to peak at your kindle or book,
because that would be creepy (yes, I just looked behind me to make sure there's
no one there), but rather that the best characters and certainly my favorite
characters are those who appear to have a story and journey of their own. It is
all very well to have a dream man with a killer body and cocky smile but does
that really compensate for having no background, no likes or dislikes? In my
opinion, no.
That’s not to say that I am opposed to a good bit of eye candy, I
love a good looking man with a plan as much as the next person and sometimes
you just need a bit of easy lovin'. However, when I want to get my teeth into
something juicy, a book that I have to stay up all night to finish reading, I
look for a little more. For a character to really grab me they need a back
story. For me, a character should have a whole history and just like in crime
shows where the cops go undercover as a completely new person, they have a new
character. That character may hate coffee (perish the thought) or may be
addicted to those tasty little caramel chocolates that circulate the stores at
Christmas or they may even like to dress up as a purple unicorn caller Bert.
Hmmm, I digress.
Anyway, back to characters. Characters have to be individuals, you
can take a bad boy turned good, an anti-hero, a geek, a jock, a good guy, the
boy next door or even an ex that comes back but that model means nothing if
there isn’t any substance. My favorite authors can take a model like one of
these and make a character so life-like, so fleshy and tangible that the FBI
and the CIA would have trouble proving they weren't real. These characters have
flaws, they have dreams and aspirations and they make mistakes. Andrew, in my
book Out of CTRL, has body issues
just like a lot of other people, he has misjudged people, he has been hurt and
struggled but he's also incredibly protective of the people he loves, has a
tendency to plant spam pop-up bombs on peoples' computers and he will agree to
almost anything to stop his feet being tickled.
There is no magic formula to do this but the author and reader
imagination is a wonderful thing, so wonderful in fact that the suspension of
disbelief is a very real thing. A reader can believe the unbelievable and the
author can create a character that seduces, annoys, irritates and charms
reader. Despite the fact there are just as many people to say nay as yay for
the Twilight series, the polarization
of the two male leads is relevant here as the characters carry a certain
weight, there is a history with Carlisle's shared experiences and a future with
Alice's vision and even insight into the private spaces of other characters in
the brief episode of Edward's perspective. Putting the story and plot aside,
the characters themselves offer something unique in the mix of flaws and
qualities that resonate. Every character is unique and not every reader is
going to picture the character in exactly the same way, just like people in the
non-book world (reality) perceive 'real' people.
I can walk down the street and see a man in a trench coat and
platinum blond hair and have a fan girl moment of thinking "oh, my god,
it's Spike!" but my friend could walk with me and think "I wish it
was Angel". Again, the key thing is that the characters have…well,
character. Simply put they have a beginning, middle and end, just like a story.
