Re-Assessing

When you are writing I think its easy to write a character that everyone can love and feel sympathy for and its strange, because what should actually be easier is being able to write a realistic character that is flawed beyond reason and that requires a lot of work to like. That's what people are.

I've been researching the back story of a character I have created for my current novel Tattooing Angels. I wanted to create someone who wasn't instantly lovable, someone that people would hesitantly identify with. I've mentioned that Wuthering Heights has been an inspiration for this novel before and Cathy is one of those characters who is hard to love and easy to hate. We don't always understand her motivations or why Heathcliffe keeps coming back but it doesn't stop us envying her her freedom and her abandon. That is the kind of character I want to write, someone who isn't instantly likeable but despite all that the reader sees little bits of themselves in her and realises that it isn't easy to hate her either.

The best research for this character has come from taking a long hard look at myself. Despite how hard we try to be good and to do the right thing we are human and human nature requires us to make a lot of mistakes. We are selfish, thoughtless and even cruel at times. I'm not always proud of what I've done and said, I doubt that anyone really is. I don't look back over the last few years and see myself as blameless in all the catastrophes but what I do see is that I'm human, that I made mistakes and even though I didn't always move past them I still recognised them for what they were. When someone hurt me then often I lashed out and tried to hurt them back; I let people down because I was too exhausted to make the effort or too protective over my own time.

All these things make a real person, a real character! Nobody wants to read about someone who never makes a mistake or puts a foot wrong, who never has a selfish thought or says something cruel. These aren't characters these are just images of what we hope one day to be, characters do everything wrong and they put it right, they fight and struggle and eventually they become something really really great.