There is the saying that well behaved women rarely make history and I feel the same about my characters. Well behaved protagonists rarely make for the best stories in my opinion. The more of a difficult history, more bad choices or poor decisions and more selfish or inherently nasty behaviour leads to more satisfying drama or moments of creative tension. This isn’t to say that all characters have to be nasty or evil, just that in reality all people have flaws and I think it is those flaws, their humanity, that makes them interesting and that makes me want to tell their stories.
My characters tend to start life as a question-a what would you do in this situation and then I layer them, flaw by flaw, emotional conflict by emotional conflict until they are as multi-faceted as a real person and with a story arc that leaves space for karma, redemption or resolution. If we think about it, some of the best loved fictional characters are those who do not do what society or the reader expects of them. Would we love Elizabeth Bennett if she had accepted her first proposal of marriage? Would we love Becky Sharpe if she had been docile and compliant and happy to accept her place in society? They are more interesting characters because we do not know what they are going to do and so we want to follow along with them to find out.
I love writing anti-heroines so that I can push the stories to the extreme of the situation. Just how far can I make my characters go? What will they do? How will they react when I put them into the situations that most of us as readers will not get to experience-and are probably grateful for these characters experiencing them in place of us, while we enjoy from the safety and comfort of our sofas. I think that characters like these give readers (and writers) space to ask ourselves some big questions about our own choices and our own moral codes, in ways which allow us to really consider these things without the destruction to our own lives that the characters we are reading are experiencing. We get to live other’s lives through stories and that’s the wonder of books-a million experiences inside the covers.
Make sure to pick up Alison’s brand new gripping psychological thriller The Silent Friend here: https://mybook.to/Silentfriendsocial