I’m sitting in for Lynne for a few Thursdays as she needs to take care of some family problems, so I trust you’ll bear with me.
I’m a writer and so, of course, I create female characters. But as a male writer I can only hope that I come up with some who are convincing. For a long time, it feels as if crime novels have tended to have two types of female – the victim or the hunter seeking some kind of vengeance.
People die. People of both sexes. I’ve always been very careful not to portray women as victims, as helpless. Nor do I have them as the bounty hunter. Either way, unless it’s done very, very well, it’s playing into a stereotype, and very few human beings are so simply defined.
I like characters to be rounded. I like strong women. I said create earlier. That doesn’t feel quite true. These are the people who come to me, who feel as strong and real as anyone I talk to on the street. I don’t know where they’re from, but they’re too solid, too formed, to be my creations. They have substance, opinions, strengths, weaknesses.
People are a mass of contradictions. It’s our nature. And to have a character come alive on a page, we have to push all those things into a form. A few years ago I read a novel by a self-published author who’s now gone on to sell a million books. Her characters were summed up by the brands they wore, from scent to shoes. I looked at another of her more recent books. The descriptions haven’t changed much. But obviously she’s doing something that appeals to readers.
And I’m not, at least not in the same way.
But while I’d love to sell that many books, I’d rather have the people on my pages seem real and whole. With loves and fears, and everything in between.
And that leads on to a question. How do you create your characters? Or do they arrive in your head fully-formed, too?